28 Jul Building Sub-lists
Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re having a fantastic day, a fantastic week, and an amazing month. In today’s quick tip, I’d like to talk briefly about building sublists to help with e-mail marketing. It’s a well-known fact that we must have a list of our customers and our prospects, to which we then make offers to and look to build and grow our business. Yes? I hope everyone is doing that.
There’s another principle, however, which can make things much, much easier, and that is to have sublists of our main list. Very simply, this means building a main list and then making offers to that list, which brings the customer to another list, which we will then call a sublist.
For example, let’s say that I have a primary list, which is this one here, my Internet business quick tips, but I have subscribers from all around the world. That’s great but not much good if I’m going to run a promotion for a workshop in my local area. People from San Francisco are not likely to travel to the sunshine coast of Australia to come to an afternoon workshop on search engine marketing. Not likely.
So within my primary list, if I were to build a sublist just for that, something I’ll be doing soon, I would ask those who were subscribed to my list, “If you live locally, here’s a special something just for you. Click here to get it.” It would take them to a page which qualifies them as “This is only for Sunshine Coast relevant residents. It is local information for marketing.” And hopefully from that I will be able to then have subscribers, people just from my local region, subscribe to that sublist and build a list just for that marketplace.
Now that’s one example of a sublist. You could have many different types. You could have one for different products or services, different areas in which you promote yourself, different regional locations. You could have one list of prospective customers and another for actual paying customers. You can break your paying customers list into sublists of those who have purchased once and those who have purchased more often.
The point behind sublist marketing is that you are marketing only to highly targeted and relevant buyers of your product, not just people who want your product or want the free stuff that you’ve given away to get them onto your first list. And when it comes down to it that is pretty much the best way, and certainly the fastest way, to get people onto your initial list – offer them something free, just as I have done with Internet Business Quick Tips and my Special Reports. But for me to market an offer in my local area to my international list is foolish. It’s far better to build a sublist and target local people. Same as when I travel interstate. Same as when I go to different cities. I should be able to build or have sublist marketing opportunities for those.
So the question you have to ask yourself is, “How can you do the same in your own business?” I spoke to someone today who runs an art import-export business and sells beautiful, low-cost prints. She has a great list of a couple hundred people, buyers. Nice. I said how many of them have purchased more than once. She said, “I don’t know, but I can find out.” I said, “You should find that out and build a list of just those people, also, because they could then guide you as to the kind of artworks you look to purchase next.
Ask them, your principal buyers, what they want. If they’re the ones who’ve purchased more than once, they’re the ones who should be giving you feedback on the things you should purchase to then sell.” That’s a good use of a sublist.
The question, again, for you is, “How can you use this in your business?”
So I challenge you this week to sit down with pen and paper, perhaps one or two other people, and figure out different ways that you can build sublists from your primary list. And then go out and put that into action. Have a great week. I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.
