Ebook Marketing: Do I Really Need An Email List?
February 8, 2010 by David Johnson
Many ebook business owners intuitively understand the value of a correctly laid out business plan. In fact, without such a plan many feel that they are lost. For the idea behind it is to constantly support the business owner to grow his business. In other words, it is a map how to find new customers.
So when we are talking about developing our ebook business, one dimension of that is growing the number of customers. The more customers we get, the more profit we get.
But it is not just customers we want. We want satisfied clients that come again to buy more of our ebooks or other products or services that we may provide.
In other words, from a long-term business point of view, it not enough to be able to find a few new customers and be getting a few new sales; we also have to make sure that those who already have bought from us will do so again.
What Are You Doing With Your Visitors?
Now let us turn to your blog or web site. Let us assume that you already have traffic to your site. Thousands of visitors come to your site every day. The question is: When new visitors come to your site, what do you do with them? Can they come to “window-shop” and leave without doing anything? Or are you counting on them to buy something? What happens if they don’t buy anything?
So the real question is this: Are you letting new visitors who haven’t bought anything when they visited your site just disappear into thin air, without knowing who they are? And even more importantly, are you letting returning visitors who already have purchased from you leave? If so, what is your plan?
All efforts to bring in visitors to your website have cost you something. So why let them run off to possibly never return, if you can prevent it? By implementing an email list on your website you can get the most money in return for your ebook marketing costs.
You will not only make more money, but you will also serve your clients better. They will sign up to your email opt-in list and take part of your email messages. And when they gradually get more and more convinced that they want to buy from you, they will one day (usually later than sooner) do so.
The Opt-in Email List: Seeing Our Ebook Marketing Plan In Action
So my proposal is this. The most intelligent thing to do, from a business point of view, is to invest some time in preparing an e-mail list for your company. By collecting email addresses we are, so to speak, building a map of the territory and our customers. In other words, this list of potential customers may be seen as real proof that our ebook marketing plan is working.
Someone may, of course, criticize this statement and say that we don’t need an email optin list to tell us that our business plan is working; for we can just keep an eye on our actual sales figures, and that will be enough. After all, the critic may say, the e-mail opt-in list is not necessarily a list of buyers, but simply a collection of people who possibly will buy in the future.
Our answer may be this. It is right that the actual sales figure is the most tangible evidence that the business plan is working right now. However, the opt-in list can tell us about the future, and in that sense it is a measurement about whether our business is continuing to work, or whether our destiny is another. For it is reasonable to expect, especially if the number of subscribers on your list is substantial (say a thousand or more), that there is a strong statistical correlation between the number of subscribers on your list and your future sales.
If we can acknowledge this as true, then an increasing number of prospective clients signing up to our optin email list would, indeed, denote that our business model is working, and that we are on the right track to making more money. The strength of the list lies therefore not primarily in the idea that it is a measure of the current sales, but that it is a measure of what our sales figures are going to be in the near future.
Optin Lists: Also For Customer Tracking
So by implementing one or several email lists you may increase your sales and simultaneously getting a better picture of what lies ahead for your company. But opt-in lists are not just about immediate sales or sales projects either. They may also be used to increase your comprehension of your customers.
One way to use the opt-in list sign-up information to understand your potential customers better is to note the date and time when they signed up. This may be significant for various reasons. One example may be that you just have launched a special AdWords advertising campaign, and you observe that the sign-up happened when that advertising campaign was live. By investigating also other aspects on the site, with for example Google Analytics, you may conclude that this, indeed, was a result of your AdWords campaign. By investigating all such occurences, you may get a nice picture of whether or not your ebook advertising campaign was successful.
Another way to analyze information from the opt-in procedure may be the following. Let us say that you have different types of opt-in forms on different pages of your site. So when the visitor signs up, you can directly see which page and form he has used. This may tell you more about this customer’s preferences and interests. Also, this information may be gathered from many customers sign-ups, which then may be compiled to a report on which forms work the best — statistics which in turn may be used to redesign or tweak certain aspects of your website.
Using an Opt-In List Is Great E-book Marketing
The bottom line, however, is this. You have to build an optin email list for your ebook business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers’ behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently appears at the EbookBrothers.com website, where he writes about ebook marketing, and on specific topics such as email opt-in lists: yes or no? etc. For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free articles and tips on how you can succeed with your own ebook plans), visit this ebook business site now, before the free offer expires.
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