Opt in Email Marketing - Targeted List Building Strategies

In any business, especially online, it's a well known fact that not all customers are created equal. In the same vain, not all email lists are created equal and you would often hear marketers boasting about the size of their lists, but does size really matter? The answer is a simple, and resounding NO. You can make just as much money with email marketing using a list of 1,000 as you would with a list of 100,000. It's all about how responsive your list actually is.

Email marketing (or permission marketing), is still one of the most lucrative ways of making money online. We are all sick and tired of the saying that 'the money is in the list' but as clichéd as it sound, this really is still true. It is however necessary that we make some more refined distinctions if we want to tap into this. In opt in email marketing, targeted leads are probably the number one consideration if you want to build a highly responsive list. For far too many marketers the a 1% conversion rate is acceptable. Conversions do not always rely on good copywriting alone. If you give people what they really want, you don't really need to sell them. When opt in email marketing is very targeted and specific, the whole selling process becomes much more synchronized. There is nothing harder than selling someone something that they don't really want or need. There is nothing easier than selling someone something they really want and need.

Working with a highly responsive mailing list is indeed a very different experience – not only in your approach, but also in the quality and quantity of your contact with them. Marketers with huge, unresponsive lists have to send out three to four emails a week just to get some response while those with highly targeted lists can afford to send only one or two emails a month, and they tend to have a much higher response rate. What this comes down to is leverage – doing less work, bagging more sales and gaining more credibility and improving your relationship with your list.

Opt in email marketing targeted at specific products or services can not be that easy to build. List building in itself caries it's own challenges and with the sheer amount of freebies floating about, it's become quite hard to build any kind of list. In many ways this is the real work behind any successful online business – it's success lies in it's list and the customer relationship that they create, maintain and grow.

So, how do you build a highly targeted and highly responsive opt in email list? Well, there are many strategies, but it relies on you drawing up a profile of your ideal customer. What does your ideal customer look like? What does she like and dislike? What is he likely to look for and expect? Once you know exactly who you are talking to, you will find that you are much more natural in your approach to your list and you will be more relaxed because you know them. Although this does not sound very important, it does come through in many subtle ways – and this is what makes all the real difference in building rapport with your list. Having huge 'random' list is so hard to sell to because you don't know whom you are talking to.

Highly responsive opt in email marketing targeted at your ideal customer is the key to success online. The challenge however is in building such a list. This can be a very costly and very time consuming task and there is no guarantee that you will be successful. Pay per click tends to be very low level traffic and building a highly responsive list from Adwords is indeed a big challenge tat can be very pricey. Building big websites with sign up offers can be very time consuming and in very competitive markets this is not really an option. Joint ventures is probably your best bet, but most marketers will be reluctant to give you a crack at their list without some big reward.

The answer, I believe lies in co-registration. It is one of the most underused, yet it's potential is massive. With co registration you can build a very targeted, highly responsive opt in marketing list in a very short time. With co-registration you buy subscribers and some co-registration services will even give you the option of 'specifying' the kind of customers you want to target. These co-registration services are most often high traffic sites with a lot of credibility which in itself already qualifies your leads.

With opt in email marketing targeted leads are everything and with co-registration you can quite literally buy these qualified leads for as little as $0.15 per lead! Not bad if you consider what you might pay for a mere click in a pay per click campaign. Focus your efforts. Focus your information and focus on your ideal customer. Not only will it make your life easier, but it will probably grow your bank account much quicker than anything else you will do online.