Most internet marketers write emails, usually to their lists.
That probably applies to you – you’ve built up a list of subscribers and you send them emails.
Likely most of those emails are written ahead of time and get sent out at pre-determined intervals by your autoresponder service.
But precisely who are you writing to?
If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re missing a trick and a lot of sales.
It’s often easy to forget that your list is made up of real people.
The numbers you get shown can be quite deceptive – you look at them and think “Great, I’ve got [insert number] people on my list!”
But if that’s the way you look at your email marketing, you’re almost certainly not making the amount of money from your list that you should do.
Take some time and do your best to work out who is on your list.
Maybe do an email that actually asks that question or asks what they want to know more about.
By no means everyone will reply – you’d be swamped with replies if that was the case – but so long as at least one person does, you can start to build up a picture of who you’re sending emails to.
For me, it’s people who are either just starting out or who’ve been doing internet marketing for a while but without seeing any real cash in their Paypal account.
On top of that, because of the way I promote, I tend to attract people who aren’t into smoke and mirrors techniques or ones that promise server melting traffic at the click of a mouse or other things that don’t often happen in real life.
I also have a good idea of the age group of my subscribers. That affects the words I use and how I write things.
If you sat down with me for half an hour, I could go into a lot more depth. At least for my main internet marketing list – the lists I’ve got in other niches are a lot less personalised and their results show that.
You need to do the same kind of thing for your lists.
If you’ve only got one list, that’s easy. Start with that.
If you’re like quite a lot of internet marketers and have got lists in various niches – some of which are working, others of which seemed like a good idea at the time – then start with one of the bigger lists and work on that first.
It’s the standard 80/20 rule: spend most of your time where it’s likely to get best results.
This kind of exercise is worth doing on a fairly regular basis – it’s easy to write a series of autoresponder messages and leave them untouched for months or even years.
One easy way to check them is to subscribe to your list – maybe with a fresh email – and check the messages that come through.
Would you read them?
That’s a good test and one they don’t always pass.
Click the links – do they still work or have some broken over time?
Are the things you’re promoting congruent with the vision you have of your subscribers? Or are they likely to grate with them, causing lower sales and a higher likelihood of unsubscribes?
The time you take to do this will be well spent.
There’s a high chance it will increase your income per subscriber and will keep responsive people on your list for longer.
If you’d like to know more about list building, you can check out my product.
But whether you do that or not, make sure you write your emails with your target market in mind.