Why Building A List Is Like Tending A Lawn

It might not appear that building a list has anything to do with keeping your lawn looking good…but it has.

One of the mistakes that listbuilders tend to make is concentrating on the numbers on their lists to the exclusion of everything else.

This would be similar to just laying a new lawn and doing nothing but ensure that the grass grows. While this will work well for a while, soon the grass will become unmanageable and you will not have the results you wanted.

However if you spend time regularly ensuring that the new lawn has the right nutrients it needs, is regularly watered and trimmed then it will look good all year round.

It is exactly the same when it comes to building a list – it needs regular maintenance and while the work needed is not too hard or even too time consuming, but it does still need to be done.

Here are three top tips to help ensure that you get the very best out of your email list:

1. Remember that you are building a list of people. The names and email addresses on your list all belong to individual people so be sure to treat them as both people and individuals. Be personal, write for the individuals on your list and not to the overall list as a whole. That way people will feel that they matter to you and that you want to help them. Using an autoresponder like RocketResponder can really help build the personal touch between you and your subscribers if you take care to treat your list as a group of individuals.

2. Be helpful, informative and respectful. Never forget that you do not have people on your list as a right…they are there because they want something from you. Generally the ‘something’ that people want is information relevant to their needs. Take care to draft a series of emails that will meet those needs so that your subscribers get the information they want in a timely manner. Make sure that every new subscriber gets a welcome email and that you let them know how they can contact you when they need additional information or when things go wrong.

3. Be flexible and react to fast-moving events. A good autoresponder is not just there for sending out a pre-written email series – it is much more flexible than that. Sometimes you will want to send out emails to your subscribers which do not fit into the pre-programmed series of emails that you had planned in advance. This is useful when you are reacting to breaking news or to new events in your niche or when you have some exciting news to impart or a new offer or promotion coming up.

It does not take too much time to keep on top of your email list, even when it grows to a large size. Just take the time and effort to tend to your list just as you might tend to a well-cared-for lawn and you will be sure to get the very best results from your list-building activities.