50-ways-to-make-your-first-sale

Chapter 24
Build Your Email List
But how to you go about getting people to join yet another newsletter - not
to mention actually buying your stuff once they’ve signed up?
At the end of the day you need the right mix of incentives, sign-up forms
and high quality, valuable content.
Let’s take a look at how to put all these ingredients together so you can drive
more sign-ups and sales.
Choose the Right Sign Up Incentive
The first stage of building your mailing list is choosing the right incentive, or
‘ethical bribe’, to offer people in exchange for joining your list. For example,
Holstee offers customers $5.00 of their purchase when they sign up.
This step is all about getting permission to follow up with your potential
customers over time.
There are lots of options you can choose from - the key is to make sure it’s
something that’s compelling. For most ecommerce businesses, this is usually
an immediate discount or the promise of getting future discounts and
information about special, members-only sales delivered by email.
There are also a number of email marketing and incentive focused apps
and services you can use to help make this step easier like Incentivibe and
ViralSweep for example.
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