Ebook Marketing: Is It True That You Need An Opt-In List?

Many ebook marketers agree that having a carefully thought out business plan is critical to their success. And that plan is there because it helps the business owner to navigate: more specifically, the business plan is, in a sense, a map to finding customers.

So on the topic of making money with ebooks, 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 get.

But we are not purely talking about any type of customers. What we want is happy and returning customers that purchase again and again from our pool of products and services.

In other words, it is not just enough, to get some quick sales and some one-time customers; we also must plan for the future, so that we may end up with happy customers that are to purchase again.

What Are Your Plans for Those Who Visit Your Site or Blog?

Now let us turn to your website or blog. Let us assume that you already have traffic to your site. Thousands 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?

So the real question is this: Are you letting new visitors who haven't bought anything when they visited your site just evaporate into thin air, without knowing who they are? And even more importantly, are you letting returning visitors who already have bought from you leave? If so, what is your plan?

Unless your uncle owns Google, all traffic you get has cost you something, either in money or time. So why let your visitors run away if you can stop it? And you can stop it, to a large degree, by using one or several opt-in lists.

You will not only make more money, but you will also serve your customers better. They will sign up to your e-mail list and take part of your email messages. And when they gradually get more and more convinced that they want to buy from you, they will one day (usually later than sooner) do so.

The Email Optin List: Our Ebook 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 ebook business will thrive. By being able to continuously track new customers that are added to the list, we will thus see, with our own eyes, that our ebook business plan is working.

The argument can, of course, be made that we don't need an opt-in e-mail 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 business 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.

The skeptic does have a point here: the number of potential customers on the optin email list does not indicate any current sales figures; so when estimating the current situation, the sales figure alone may be the best gauge. However, it is reasonable to expect, especially for large numbers of people on the emailing list, that there is a correlation between the number of email addresses and the number of people who will buy from our company in the future.

So if we may accept this proposition as true, then we could say that a growing number of people signing up to our email optin list surely would indicate that our ebook marketing model is working, and that our future looks promising. The power of the list lies therefore not so much in the idea of being a gauge of the current state of our business, but is more of a measure of how our sales are going to manifest in the near future.

Opt-in Email Lists: Also For Analyzing Customer Behaviour

So by implementing one or several email lists you may boost your sales and simultaneously getting a better picture of what lies ahead for your company. But opt-in lists are not just about immediate sales or sales projects either. They may also be used to increase your comprehension of your customers.

For example, the information about when they signed up to your email list can be important. If you just had an AdWords advertising campaign going on, and observed that the campaign was still running when the visitor opted in to your list, you may conclude, in conjunction with other factors, that this was a direct result of your campaign.

Another way to use the email 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.

Adding an Opt-In List Is Excellent Ebook Marketing

The bottom line, however, is this. You must build an opt-in email list for your e-book business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers' behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.

Article Source: http://gurumarketingarticles.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones is currently a contributor to the EbookBrothers.com website, where he shares his thoughts about ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, such as this article on the art of optin list building, etc. For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free e-articles, tips and tricks on how to succeed with your own e-book business plans), please visit EbookBrothers.com right now, before the free offer expires.

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