Co Registration Lead Resource

I’ve recently written about the importance of testing everything about your emails, especially when working with coreg leads. You have to test subject lines, placement of your links, text vs. html emails, whether or not to use a postscript, and every other variable you can think of, including time of day, day of week, and frequency of mailing.

Equally important, however, is paying attention to “warming up” your list. Even if they are double opt-in leads direct from your website, and especially if they are “cold” coregistration leads, you need to allow them time to get to know you, and establish that you are credible and trustworthy.

Warming up a list involves giving out a lot of free information, and going easy on the “hard sell”, especially in the beginning. You need to provide good, but incomplete information. The good information proves you know what you are talking about, and the incompleteness leaves them motivated to buy your product or service.

Research has shown that few people will buy a product until they have heard about it from 5 to 7 times. Similarly, people are unlikely to warm up to your email messages without at least as much exposure.

In addition to the sense of trust and familiarity that develops over time, you can also use the warming up period to “train” your list members. If you include links to more information in even your earliest emails, you are slowly but surely conditioning your list members to click links to get something.

You may even want to offer a few low-priced products in your early emails to get some of your list members used to paying for information. Many marketers follow a progression from offering low-priced products, and then offering their higher priced products only to those who bought the less expensive ones, or at least not promoting the more expensive ones until people have been on their list for some time.

You have to walk a thin line between not trying to sell too early and not conditioning your list members to expect everything to be free, and keep in mind that your early emails serve the primary purposed of establishing in the minds of your readers that you are knowledgeable, credible, and a source of quality information.

Warming up a list, especially one made up of co reg leads,  is as much art as science, so the only way to learn how is to get started and do it, and keep track of what works.

Technorati Tags: working with coreg leads, Warming up a list, co reg leads

In my last post, I addressed the question of what works best with coregistration leads. Soon after, a customer called me to complain that “something is wrong” with his list.

Duh. If you build a website that does not convert sales, it does not follow that “something is wrong” with your site visitors. It means that something is wrong in what you are trying to sell to them, or how you are trying to sell it.

The same holds true for your mailing list, whether it is your prime double opt-in house list, or a brand new list made up of coregistration leads.

You have to track and test everything. Split-test various subject lines. Test whether putting the link at the top, middle, or bottom of the email gets you better click through and conversion rates.

Test whether long or short emails work better. Test whether the width of the text in your emails has an impact. Test whether an html email with an imbedded image is better than text only email. In short, test everything you can think of.

Email marketing, especially building a list with coregistration leads is part art, and part science. What *you* think is a great subject line may be a total dud in the eyes of your readers, but the only way you can know that is to test and track everything.

Among my customers, the ones who report the best results invariably are avid split-testers. They will often buy a list of coregistration leads for the sole purpose of testing subject lines or some other aspect of their campaigns.

They split the list they bought into several groups and carefully track how well they did with a given subject line. They dump the poorest performing lines, and test some new ones, slowly refining things as they go.

Then they focus on the contents of the emails, trying various sequences and again tracking their results carefully. They know they are going to spend some money in the beginning just to learn “what works” but will make it up down the road once their campaign is fine tuned and in high gear.

These people understand that knowing the long term value of a subscriber is at the heart of successful email marketing. They know that they will make a certain profit every month, on average, for every subscriber on their list, and that as long as they pay less than that to acquire those subscribers, they will turn a profit.

Successful marketers think long term.

I have links to excellent email marketing tools including tools for testing and tracking your results at NitroListBuilder.com. Check them out, and start being a scientific marketer.

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Technorati Tags: what works best with coregistration leads, building a list with coregistration leads, successful email marketing