Building a profitable email list takes a number of things.

Obviously you need a way of sending them messages (which is where an autoresponder comes in) and messages to send them – either pre-written ones in a sequence or ones that you construct daily or a mixture of those methods.

But an essential part is the ability and willingness of your list to spend money…

An extreme example is one company that I’m aware of in the self help business that doesn’t even send regular emails to non-buyers.

They’ve found one of the biggest secrets of building a profitable email list: buyers are more profitable than freebie seekers.

Personally I’ve got a mixture of lists: ones that I’ve built up by offering a free gift and other ones that are made up from buyers.

Whenever I analyse the profitability of these lists, the buyers lists are far and away more profitable than the freebie seekers.

To the extent that after the initial opt-in, I’d probably be better off not to keep the people who haven’t bought.

If you sit down and look at the lists you’ve built, you’ll probably find the same thing.

Of course, that assumes that you’ve got the details of the buyers in the first place.

If it’s not your own product – in other words, if you’re an affiliate marketer – then you usually aren’t given the email address of the buyers.

That leaves you between a rock and a hard place: how can you remove the non-buyers if you don’t get told who the buyers are?

Especially if you’re automatically redirecting to an affiliate page once they’ve signed up for your list.

Incidentally, that can work well to get initial buyers.

I do it on various self-help products (especially hypnosis) where I immediately send people who sign up to my list direct to a page where they can purchase a download.

But there’s still the sticky problem of weeding out the non-buyers.

One way that you can get the email address of the keener buyers is to offer a bonus.

Some systems like Warrior Plus and JVZoo allow you to do this as part of their process. So you can include a page to sign up to your list as part of the process or do like I do and make it a simple “confirm your details” sign-up box that has to be completed before the bonus is delivered.

But if you’re not promoting products from those two companies then you probably won’t get that option either.

If that’s the case then another way is to offer a bonus to people who buy through your link.

Simply ask them to send you a copy of their receipt in order to get the bonus.

You won’t get 100% take-up on that offer – that’s fine.

But providing your bonus is worthwhile, you’ll get some.

And they’ll probably be the keener buyers.

I know that for some affiliate marketing launches, people make their buying decision based on who is offering the best bonuses.

It’s worth doing and monitoring.

And it’s worth treating your buyers list like the potential goldmine that it is!

If you’d like to know more about building a profitable email list, check this out.