Your Email List Building Strategy Checklist
Plotting And Planning – What Are Your Goals?
What do you want to accomplish?
- Get readers back to your site
- Email offers
- Share content
- Build community
- Convert sales
What do you want to cover?
- Thanks & Welcome
- Set expectations
- Deliver freebies
How many emails?
- Create a quick outline of the content you want to cover
- Decide how many emails to send
- Decide how many days between emails
Here’s an example of a possible planning layout:
- Day 0 – Welcome Email
- Day 1 – Email #1
- Day 2 – Email #2
- Day 3 – Email #3
- Day 4 – Email #4
- Day 5 – Email #5
- Day 7 – Email #6
- Day 9 – Email #7
- Day 12 – Email #8
- Day 16 – Email #9
- Day 21 – Email #10
Continue from here with weekly A/R emails
The Welcome Email and Thank You Page
Remember first impression are important. Make sure the one your email subscribers get of you is a good one.
If you’ve had your list for a while, go ahead and sign up as if you were a regular subscriber. Pay attention to the welcome email and the thank you page.
- What do you like about it?
- What can you improve to make a better first impression?
Creating Your Thank You Page
- Thank your readers for signing up.
- Remind them to confirm the opt-in if applicable
- Let them know to look for the welcome email
- Share how / where they can get their freebie (or)
- Set up a link to download the freebie.
- Make an offer for an entry level product they might find helpful.
- Your image and signature to create credibility
- Links to your blog and social media profiles
Creating Your Welcome Page
- Decide if you’re delivering the thank you gift in the email as an attachment or with a link (we recommend a link)
- Reiterate the offer from the thank you page
- List expectations of what’s to come.
- Keep it Short & Sweet
Write Them Quick and Keep It Easy
- Be consistent in your greeting & closing
- Write in a personal style
- Write like you’re writing to one person
- Ask questions
- Encourage them to reply to your email
- Don’t get bogged down in the body of the email
- Spend time on the subject line
- Keep a swipe file of emails you like (particularly subject lines that made you open the email)
- Check your open rates and keep note of the ones that were opened most often. Use those as a template for creating other good subject lines.
Load The Emails To Your Autoresponder
- Follow the documentation for your chosen autoresponder manager
- Add more autoresponder emails each week & as needed
Track The Results and Listen To Feedback
After you get your first 100 new subscribers take a look at the data.
- Check open rates
- Check the click through rates
- Look at the unsubscribes
Pay attention to the emails with higher open rates
- Were they topics your readers were interested in or was the subject line awesome?
- Was there a particular email that resulted in more than usual unsubscriptions?
Pay attention to email replies but don’t take the haters and trolls to heart. If they have a valid issue then deal with it. If they’re just spewing ignore & delete.
Tweak and Plan Your Next Batch Of Emails
- Don’t stop now.
- Plan your next batch of emails
Set aside a little time once a week or even just once a month to plan, write, and add a new batch of follow up or autoresponder messages. Keep it up and you’ll start to see:
- More traffic to your blog.
- More subscribers as you current readers share your emails with others.
- More interaction on your social media accounts if you share those in your emails.
- More one-on-one interaction with your readers and subscribers as they reply to your messages.
- More sale as you add more offers to your follow up funnel.
