I recently realized that I am a serial builder-lister person. Let me explain…

We all know that list-building has to be part of our overall marketing strategy if we are going to continually have a pipeline – attracting those who can use our services. If we don’t do this, then that’s when we fall into the feast-famine cycle (once the client project is done, then it’s back to finding more clients). For most of us, this means ‘building our list.” Technology is great for this strategy! We have list managers, autoresponders, CRM systems, lead magnets, opt-in forms… nowadays it’s a lot easier to build your list thanks to all these tools.

Contrary to what the marketing experts and gurus say, which is to build an opt-in offer and then continually tweak that page to measure your conversion rate and ultimate your offer to client or customer conversion rate, my approach to list-building is the kitchen sink model.

I LOVE to build new offers, try new things, and people seem to really like that. Don’t get me wrong, it IS important to track your metrics so that you can make business decisions, but I think opt-in offers and lead magnets are things to play with. Like a fun toy to play with, maybe take it apart, give it a haircut, change its clothes, put it in a hot corvette and tie it on to the back of your bike as you ride around town. LOL, my childhood days of playing with my Bionic Woman doll are showing.

Experiment, see what works and what doesn’t, try different things, and have fun with it – that’s all I’m saying.

This month, I’m going to show you a few tactics that I use to build my list and this week we start with quizzes.

I think we’ve all taken a quiz, those quick questionnaires that ask a series of questions and then provide those who opt-in with their email, their segmented results. The pros are that your audience will learn something about themselves and will get information quickly, you will learn a lot about your audience and can segment based on their responses, and they are fun!

The cons are that they may be tricky or techie to set up, you have to put some thinking into how you structure your quiz, and the content has to be valuable AND true. As I mention in the video, if you are just collecting a bunch of information and everyone gets the same results, NOT cool.

In this short video, I take you behind the scenes to see how I set up my quiz.

This is Lisa Wells and welcome to Systems Sunday. We are wrapping up our theme for the month, which was list-building, and today’s lesson is how to keep your list happy by making it easy for your subscribers to manage their email communication using an email preferences center.

Why do you need an email prefs center?

First, it provides an easy way for your subscribers to manage their email (what they get and how often they get it). It also cuts down on the unsubscribe rate. The industry average is about 1%. So if you have a list of 1,000 people, every time you send a broadcast, on average, about 10 people will unsubscribe. I don’t know about you, but I take unsubscribes and opt-outs kind of personally, so I try to make it easy for my list to unsubscribe and make choices about what they want from me.

You can do this with time-based, meaning, this type of preference center gives your subscribers the option to receive email less often, maybe on a specific cadence, or a chance to take a set break from receiving email for a set amount of time.

There is also content-based, this is what I do. A content-based preference center lets them pick the types of communication that they do or do not want you to send them.

And then there’s campaign-based and I’m going to show you an example of that.

Now, the reason why people opt-out, “Too many emails” is usually #1 or #2 on the list year after year. So having a time-based preference, lets them choose how often, where someone can choose to receive less or more emails, is great. So if you send a weekly newsletter, they can instead opt for a monthly digest. This is something you can survey your list and just ask. When I surveyed my people years ago, I had a monthly newsletter and asked if they wanted to keep getting it monthly or would they rather get it twice monthly, I have about 50/50. That didn’t help me make any business decisions, but if you see a clear trend or an overwhelming majority who wanted something from you, it may be something to think about.

Having a content-based preferences center lets your subscribers choose the how – what they get from you – and is great for those who segment their list.

And then we have campaign-based. Remember that stat I showed you earlier, where the average opt-out rate for an email was 1%? Well, during a launch when people are sending LOTS of emails, the unsubscribe percentage could go up to around 3%. Again, if you have 1,000 on your list, you might lose 30 people for each “sales” email you send. What I like to do is add a way to opt-out of the campaign.

Having a campaign-based opt-out mitigates the jump in opt-outs during a launch or sales campaign. Let me show you what I have…

[Demo]

Here is an invitation sequence, so during a launch, you are getting an email every couple of days or so throughout the launch or the sales period. What I like to do is at the bottom of the email, I like to add, “I only do this … once in a while, if you’d rather not get these, click here” and then I have a way for them to opt-out of that one campaign but not out of my main list.

Let me show you the back end of the email preferences center. Here’s a typical broadcast email and usually all of the emails will have at the very bottom “I only want to send you what you’re interested in, update your settings in my email preferences center.” When they click on this link, it goes to a page in my Infusionsoft where they can adjust their settings and segment themselves.

In the back-end, in Infusionsoft, here’s the landing page, once they click on it, the decision diamonds act to tag them. And it tags them “yes” or “no.” Now when I send something out, I just select based on those tags.

Catch up on previous List-Building Systems episodes + resources mentioned in the video:

• [Video] How to Build Your List Doing a Challenge
• [Video] My Most Popular and Effective Lead Magnet
• [Video] How to Build Your List with a Giveaway
• [Video] Keep Your List Happy by Using an Email Preferences Center
• Infusionsoft is what I use to build campaigns and automate my marketing. I am an Infusionsoft Certified Partner so reach out to me if you want to talk about Infusionsoft pricing and benefits.

Did you enjoy this episode and want to put it into action? Grab this kit!