List building is, or SHOULD be, one of the biggest priorities of any website. While getting your website to generate revenue is also very important, many website owners overlook building a mailing list as their number one tool for generating sales. It doesn’t matter whether your business is internet based or an offline “bricks and mortar” business; both will benefit from having a customer base available at the click of the mouse. Getting people to fill our an opt-in form can be a challenge and this post will share with you three very creative ways to generate more leads.

Why you need a mailing list:

Think about this. People who have visited your site and opted in to your mailing list have already shown they have an interest in your products or services. They may or may not have already bought from you. Many of these visitors are not quite ready to buy yet for a number of reasons. If you do not capture those people’s emails before they leave your site, you may never see them again. For whatever reasons, they may not have bookmarked yours site, they found another site that caught their attention, they forgot where they found your site,and so on, they may never return to your website. If that happens, the sale will go to the website they find when they are ready to make their purchase. By having these potential customers on your mailing list and actively staying in contact with them, they will naturally turn to you when they are ready to buy.

Your buying customers can be a great source of future revenue. By having them on your mailing list it allows you to up-sell complimentary products, cross sell and have a waiting market whenever you introduce any new products. Since these customers already trust you, they are an easier sell.

You may not know that I run a very profitable offline business. Before I started building a list I was selling products but my conversion rates were sporadic at best. I had no problem getting traffic, but I thought I should be selling more products for the amount of visitors that were coming to my website. Then I began learning about building a list and email marketing. This truly was the turning point for my business, although I didn’t know it at the time. Now I can easily take my mailing list of about 20,000 and generate $10,000 in sales per week without breaking a sweat. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you will get the same monetary results. I sell big ticket custom-made items and those sales represent 5-10 sales per week. If my mailing list were for items that were not considered major purchases, I may well have gotten 100-200 sales per week from them. The fact is that when you have a customer base who have already shown an interest in your product, a mailing list is a very cost effective way to reach your market. It has a much higher ROI than advertising.

Creative Ways to Get More Opt-ins to your Mailing List:

When I first started, like many of you I am sure, I put an opt-in form on my website and I expected every visitor would naturally want to fill it out. Boy, was I in for a disappointment! Very few people did. Then I read somewhere that if you offered a free PDF that your opt-in rates would soar….nope. That didn’t work either because everyone else was doing that too and people quickly realized that the free reports generally had very little value as they didn’t contain any new information.

It was time to start thinking outside the box and put my creativity to work. Now I should point out that I use Aweber as my mailing list manager/autoresponder service. I have tried them all, even the heavy hitters, but I have found that Aweber is by far the best and at a smaller price tag than many of the others. So if you use a different service, you may or may not be able to implement these tactics.

1. Replace your contact form with an opt-in form. You can replicate the look of a standard mailing form by including additional text fields. Create a contact page and put your opt-in form on it. If you use the double opt-in method for your list, the customer still has to confirm their request and they will if they really want an answer to their question.
2. Did you know your visitors can opt-in to your mailing list via email? If you are like me, you field a lot of email questions about your products or services. You can set up your mail link on your website, or your reply link in your email, to go to your email opt-in address instead of your email address. You will still receive the email via Aweber, but the contact will now be added to your list.
3. Create a brochure or current price list of your products instead of a free report. This idea was the first creative tactic I developed and it worked extremely well for me. I found that 90% of the questions I was answering by email every day were questions about my products and the pricing of the custom items. So I created a PDF of FAQ, additional product info and the current price list and made it available via opt-in form. I removed all of my email contact info from my website so the only way a customer could get additional info on the products was through this opt-in. I don’t put the prices of my products on the website, instead, I will tell people to download the current price list as the prices can change from time to time….and guess what? It worked! I not only grew my list, I cut back on the amount of time I spent answering questions in my email so it made me more efficient.

If you only use one of these lead generation strategies your list will grow but if you can put all three of them to work for your business you will never run out of customers to sell to.

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