E-book Marketing: Do You Need to Have An Opt-in Email List?

Many ebook business owners intuitively understand the value of a suitably laid out business plan. In fact, without such a plan many feel that they are lost. For the idea behind it is to continuously inspire the business owner to develop his business. In other words, it is a map how to find new customers.

So when we say that we want to grow our ebook business, we are almost certainly talking about an increasing number of customers (although other factors may be there also). For the more customers we can get, the more profit we will be able to obtain.

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

In other words, from a long-term business perspective, it not sufficient to be able to locate a few new customers and be getting a few new sales; we also have got to make sure that those who previously have bought from us will do so again.

What Are Your Plans for Those Who Visit Your Site?

Now let us turn to your website. Let us assume that you already have traffic to your site. Hundreds 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 at all? Or are you counting on them to buy something? What happens if they don’t buy anything?

The question, therefore, is this: Can you afford to let non-buying visitors just leave without telling you who they are? And, perhaps even more important, should you allow buying visitors to go?

Even if you have steady traffic to your website, that traffic has not come to you completely free; normally lots of time and money have been spent to drive traffic to your pages. So why let anyone escape if you can stop it? Implement an opt-in list (or several ones, for different types of visitors or products) and you can stop that trend, and you will get a much better ROI (return on investment) in the long run.

This way, you will also let your potential customers in control: they sign up and listen to your email messages; and when they are truly certain that they can trust buying from you, they will (usually later than sooner) buy from you.

The Optin Email List: The E-book Marketing Plan In Action

The most important idea of this article is the following: by investing some time and money in preparing a professional opt-in list with which you can build a list of potential customers, your e-book business will flourish. By being able to always track new customers that are added to the list, we will thus see, with our own eyes, that our e-book business 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 purchased anything yet. So it is no signal 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 just look at the sales numbers: if there is more sales, then it is working; if there isn’t, it’s not.

Our answer may 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 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.

If we can accept this as true, then an increasing number of prospective customers signing up to our email list would, indeed, be a sign of that our business model is working, and that we are on the right track to making more money. The force of the list lies therefore not chiefly in the idea that it is a measure of the current sales, but that it is a measure of what our sales figures are going to be in the near future.

Optin Email Lists: Also Good For Customer Behaviour Analysis

Email lists are then 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.

One way to use the email list sign-up information to understand your potential customers better is to note the date and time when they signed up. This may be significant for various reasons. One example may be that you just have launched a special AdWords advertising campaign, and you observe that the sign-up happened when that advertising campaign was live. By investigating also other aspects on the site, with for example Google Analytics, you may conclude that this, indeed, was a result of your AdWords campaign. By investigating all such occurences, you may get a nice picture of whether or not your ebook advertising campaign was successful.

Another way to use the opt-in 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.

Building an Opt-In List Is Good E-book Marketing

Whatever some bum marketers may be saying, email list building is essential for anyone who is planning a serious e-book business. By building an optin email list, the ebook marketer can continuously communicate with the subscribers and gradually build trust. And whenever there is trust (and products or services to sell), there is sales.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently writes for the EbookBrothers.com website, where he shares his experience on ebook marketing, and on individual topics such as opt-in lists: useful or not? etc. For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free tips and e-articles on how you can succeed with your own ebook business), visit www.EbookBrothers.com now, before the free offer expires.

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