Day 15 of #100daysmarketingcreatives - Do I Need A Mailing List?
So you have a product to market and you have created the basics of your 1st website why not jump straight into setting up your all singing all dancing shop? Well it is too soon just now. It will take quiet some time to design that, get all your products upload (assuming you have several already and if you haven't it is still too soon), you then need to carefully word listings, take good photos, optimise search keywords and so on (all to follow in this project). It might take several weeks if not months to get that far. In the meantime people are visiting your new website and going away again. That is a lost opportunity. The most important thing to do at this point is to set up your mailing list so that you start to record people's details so that once you are fully up and running you can contact them and bring them back again to have a look - a ready made audience!
So how important is a contact on a mailing list? Many people look at large numbers of followers that they can grow on Instagram, Facebook etc and compare that to much smaller numbers they grow on a mailing list. The thing is you cannot compare them like for like - they are very different. I read somewhere that 1 contact on a mailing list is worth 10 followers on Instagram. I don't think that is a bad estimate although I suspect it might be worth a few more personally. So get 200 people on your mailing list and that is equivalent to a 2K Instagram following, 2000 people is equivalent to a 20k Instagram following!
To understand that think about your own use of Instagram verses email. Do you read every post from every Instagram account you follow every day? Of course you don't. Some people follow 1000 accounts or more. There aren't enough hours in a day to read all their posts every day are there? You read what you can in the few minutes at a time each day that you use Instagram. If you have favourite accounts that you have interacted with a lot then Instagram will favour these in your feed but many other posts just will not get seen at all unless you spend all day on the system and if you miss today's post it is quickly superseded by tomorrow's posts and so on. If you do stop to read something how much do you read? Do you see an image you like then click 'like' and move on, do you get through the first paragraph of text? Do you even get close to purchasing? I am sure like most of us your attention span is minimal unless you really get hooked into something (like this #100daysmarketingcreatings project perhaps?).
Now think about how you use email. Yes we all get lots of spam these days and have spam filters to help with this but generally if we have signed up to a mailing list we want to read the content don't we? Do we read it immediately? Well sometimes perhaps but a lot of the time we might deal with urgent email first. But does this mean the mailing list email simply disappears? No. This is the main difference. It continues to sit there in our inbox until we do something about it. That is why it is so much more valuable! We will make a conscious decision to read it or to delete it at some point. If we do choose to read it we can choose the best time to read it when we are not rushed and have time to study it in detail. We can even flag the email with reminders so that we do not forget about it. Yes sometimes we are just overwhelmed with the email we need to get through in the time we have available and we will delete things but a lot of the time (especially close to Christmas hint) we will receive emails that give us good ideas and we will keep them and read them thoroughly won't we?
So how big does my email list need to be? Well like most things nothing comes easy does it. It does depend on many variables such as your product, mailing frequency, quality of emails, quality of your list and so on (more on all of that later in the project) but I will say you need 500 or more people on there before you start to see sales with every mailing. 2000 on a good quality list will see frequent sales but aim for 10000 or more to really reap the rewards. That is why you need to start now as it really takes time to build.
OK seems like a good idea so how do I start? The good news is it is free to start and it is easy. I will reveal all on Day 16 - Setting Up Your 1st Mailing List. How many customers do you have on your mailing list and how effective is it?
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Do you have a mailing list?
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