Ebook Marketing: Do I Really Need An Opt-In List for Subscribers? Print E-mail
By Johnny Jones

 Many e-book entrepreneurs are careful about planning their businesses and their ebook marketing strategies. One thing that most of them agree on is that they have to have a well-thought-through marketing plan. With no it, they are lost. And that e-book marketing plan is there for a reason: it aids the business owner to chart out the territory so that he can grow his business. In other words, it is a map to find customers.


So if one is trying to identify certain ways to make money with ebooks, we could say that the growth of customers may be an intrinsic part of that. By increasing the number of customers, we also increase our potential profit.

But we are not only talking about any kind of customers. What we want is fulfilled and returning customers that buy again and again from our pool of products and services.

So it is not enough, as seen from a long-term business perspective, to have completed some sales and having some new customers; we also must take care of our already existing customers and offer them new products and services.

What Are You Doing With Your Website Visitors?

Now let us turn to your blog or web site. Let us assume that you already have traffic to your site. Hundreds or thousands of visitors come to your site every day. The question is: When new visitors come to your site, what do you do with them? Can they come to "window-shop" and leave without doing anything? Or are you counting on them to buy something? What happens if they don't buy anything?

The question, in other words, is this: Can you afford to let non-buying visitors go? And, even more essential, can you afford to let buying visitors go? After all, since they have already demonstrated that they are ready to buy from you, why not put together a marketing system to cater to those users?

All efforts to bring visitors to your website have cost you something. So why let them escape to possibly never return, if you can stop it? By implementing an opt-in e-mail list on your website you can get the most money in return for your e-book marketing expenses.

You will not only make more money, but you will also serve your clients better. They will sign up to your opt-in email list and take part of your email messages. And when they gradually get more and more convinced that they want to buy from you, they will one day (usually later than sooner) do so.

The Opt-in List: Our Ebook Business Plan In Action

The main idea that I am trying to put forward is this: if you invest some time in setting up an email opt-in list (a so-called autoresponder system), this makes perfect business sense. By being able to track potential customers we are, in a sense, getting a map of the territory and our future customers. We may thus see the email list as tangible evidence that our ebook marketing plan is working.

The argument can, of course, be made that we don't need an email list of potential customers to verify that our business model is working. After all, these people are not necessarily the real customers anyway, since they have not necessarily acquired anything yet. So it is no sign of that our ebook marketing plan is working. If there are no sales yet, what good is it for? So a better indication of that our business plan is working would be to merely look at the sales figures: if there is more sales, then it is working; if there isn't, it's not.

Our answer could be this. It is accurate that the actual sales figure is the most tangible evidence that the business plan is working right now. However, the opt-in e-mail list can tell us about the future, and in that sense it is a measurement about whether our business is continuing to work, or whether our destiny is another. For it is reasonable to expect, especially if the number of subscribers on your list is substantial (say a thousand or more), that there is a strong statistical correlation between the number of subscribers on your list and your future sales.

So if we may accept that proposition as true, then we could say that a growing number of people signing up to our optin list surely may indicate that our business model is working, and that our future looks promising. The power of the list lies therefore not so much in the idea of being a gauge of the current state of our business, but is more of a measure of how our sales are going to manifest in the near future.

Optin Lists: Also For Tracking Customers

Email lists are thus necessary tools for getting your business to grow with new customers and sales. But opt-in lists are not merely used to signing up new potential customers or generate new sales; they can also be used to analyze the customers in various ways.

For example, the information about when they signed up to your email list can be important. If you just had an AdWords advertising campaign going on, and saw that the campaign was still running when the visitor opted in to your list, you may conclude, in conjunction with other factors, that this was a direct result of your campaign.

Another way to use the email optin list sign-up information to understand your potential customers better is to place different sign-up forms in different locations on your website. When the user signs up, you can then track from which form he signed up. This may tell you more about his interests and personality. Also, it may tell you something about which forms work best, and by doing so, it may give information about how to tweak your website.

Using an Opt-In List Is Good Ebook Marketing

The bottom line, however, is this. You have got to build an email list for your e-book business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers' behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently writes for the EbookBrothers.com website, where he publishes his thoughts on ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, such as building an email optin list of customers, etc.

For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free e-articles, tips and tricks on how to succeed with your own ebook marketing plans), visit the Ebook Brothers web site immediately, before the free offer expires.


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