Affiliate Marketing Tips – 10 Facts You Cannot Ignore About Email Lists

You must have heard about the all powerful Lists. You make your email subscribers’ list & start promoting your products & affiliate services & you will see the dollars rolling in. While that statement is theoretically correct, there are several facts about growing your lists that you should keep in mind.

In this post on the continuing Affiliate Marketing Tips series,I will share 10 Facts about email subscribers & how to grow & manage lists. These facts are from our practical experience in running multiple affiliate niche websites over a period of 2 years, so in all probability you will be able to relate them quite easily.

We manage our email lists here with AWeber (Click Here to Sign Up with AWeber) and a few others for our other websites (Click Here to See What Email Services we Use).

10 Facts You Cannot Ignore About Email Lists

1. Offer New Visitors Something They Cannot Pass Off – almost all websites now a days offer something or the other to entice visitors to sign up. ebooks, free gifts, free downloads, free coupons etc are now very common. Visitors need a very strong reason to sign up. Offer your visitors something they just cannot pass off.

2. Offer Something Original & unique as an Incentive to Sign Up & Continue to Offer Incentives – Visitors are not happy with one time offers. As eager as they are to sign up, many will immediately unsubscribe after receiving the “free offers”! So you have to continue to provide value to keep them subscribed.

Here we continue to publish very relevant eBooks that are critical to your success as an Affiliate Blogger. When you subscribe, you will receive all our eBooks for free. Hardly 2 – 3% of the 100+ websites we studied had something to offer continuously.

3. Double Opt-In vs Single Opt-In – law requires in the US that all email subscriptions are double opt in. And all the commercial email management services will enforce double opt-in to protect their penetration rates & avoid being labeled as spammers by the ISPs.

Many subscribers will forget to go back to their email inbox & click that confirmation link. There are several ways to minimize this fall out, but you simply can’t avoid it. Subscribers from countries that do not require double opt-in are most likely to falter.

First time subscribers from Asian countries & Latin American countries form the bulk of these errors. You will not be able to send a “reminder” email to any of these people & so they are lost forever. About 50 – 70% of subscribers from these regions will never confirm their subscriptions.

4. Followers vs People Hungry for Free Offers – not every subscriber is a follower. A follower is one who understands that you are offering something free & in return you may send them promotional emails on various products & services. Followers create a mutually beneficial symbiotic relation with you & continue to be subscribers life long.

People Hungry for Free Offers will subscribe just for the moment. They will unsubscribe as soon as they get the Free Offer. There is no possibility of developing a long term relationship with these visitors. They are simply hungry for what’s free.

You have to recognize these 2 types of subscribers. There is nothing wrong with either of them. But whatever you do, you have to do it for the benefit of the long term subscribers. The momentary subscribers were never really in your radar! About 5 – 7% of subscribers would be in this category.

5. Email Subscribers & Participants – you may have lined up a series of follow up messages & broadcasts for your subscribers, but simply sending them emails do not mean that they are reading it.

Of all the email subscribers, our 2 year study on all our websites continuously showed that over 20 – 30% of the subscribers never opened their emails.

We shared our statistics with other marketers & found that the numbers varied widely in niches. Healthcare niche for example, had the highest percentage of subscribers who opened their emails, while technology & games niches had the least number.

It may not be a problem with your emails, it may just as well the behavior of email recipients & subscribers in these niches. Since there are too many technology related sites, people may have registered with more websites & content providers than they could handle, thus leading to low rates of emails being read.

6. Emails Are Still Primarily One Way Communication with Subscribers – no matter what other marketers tell you, emails are still a 1-way communication channel with your subscribers. You say something, they listen. That’s it.

If you are sending your blog updates & you are trying to establish a 2-way communication, you should encourage them to come over to your websites. Though many marketers email the full article, and that is quite nice, they do not need anyone to come back to their websites for more.

In data discussed with a few other marketers, a very small percentage of email subscribers come back to the blog for more, even if you are providing summary updates in emails. The percentage varied from 30 – 50% of subscribers.

7. Daily Digest vs Weekly & Monthly Updates – decide how frequently you want to email subscribers with updates. There are many who send daily updates, while many send weekly or monthly. There are still a lot of marketers who would only send promotional emails only (and not the blog updates).

People are fighting desperately with excess amount of information. Look at how many emails come to your Hotmail or Yahoo! mail boxes. You simply cannot expect your subscribers to read your updates daily!

From our study we found that weekly update emails were read over 50% more than daily emails, whereas monthly updates were opened only 20% more than daily emails.

Most of our updates are now sent weekly & we send only the summary in most cases, while for a few of our niches, we do not send any updates at all!

8. HTML emails vs Text emails – increasingly more and more people are reading emails on their mobile phones. Many of them do not display HTML emails properly & it could be a big challenge to get the message across.

All our emails from AWeber have a HTML version as well as a text version.

Across all our niches, we experimented with both these formats and we found that text versions were 50 – 70% more effective (they were opened), which possibly means that our subscribers were using mobile devices mainly (like Blackberry smart phones) to read emails.

9. Migrating your Email Service Provider is a Big No-No – this is a disastrous step and you should have a really strong reason to do that. We had to do this ones for a photography website & e lost over 80% subscribers – simply because they never knew that we had a new provider that required them to subscribe again!

Anytime you change email service provider, the new one will require subscribers to double opt-in again in their system. Many subscribers will never know that they have to & will consequently ignore the messages, causing them to fall-off the subscribers’ list.

Prepare your readers & subscribers well in case you have to change your provider to keep this loss to a minimum.

10. Branding Email Subject Line vs Generic Subject Lines – you can create custom subject lines to all your messages or keep them generic. For example, you could send an update with a subject line reading “Updates from 11/11/1111 to 12/12/1212″ or you could brand it with your company or website’s name like “ProMediaBlog Updates – Making Money Online by Blogging Effectively”.

In our tests over a year, we found that branded emails (as in the second example) had over 80% success rates compared to those with generic emails. Subscribers immediately recognize the name (and the description) & know who it is from & what sort of messages they are, leading to higher success rates.

Conclusion

Building email lists is a continuous activity and you have to continue to grow them. There will be numerous unsubscriptions and for the most part that is acceptable. However, if you find that long term subscribers are discontinuing, then that is the sign of a serious trouble!

For the most part, people who subscribe intend to build long term relations, so with every email you should ensure that if not anything else, you are not giving them any reasons to unsubscribe.