List Building - How to Make Small Lists Act Big With Good Email List Management

The assumption that highly profitable email marketing requires a large list is wrong. Most aspiring online marketers, or even more experienced ones, envy the size of the "guru list". You know, the subscriber lists of 250,000 or more. What they might not realize is that those lists sometimes are full of junk, almost literally.

Ask yourself how a marketer builds an email list that big. It's possible he works hard at it and convinces 250,000 real people to give him quality email addresses. More often than not, though, his list building results came from three sources:

Quality email addresses from real people (yes, there are some of those on the list)
Single opt-in folks who probably don't want to be on the list in the first place (versus double opt-in subscribers who confirm that they DO want to be on the list)
"Freebie seekers" who give a phony email address to get Business Email List whatever free incentive the marketer was offering to people who gave him an email address
Odds are good that the second two categories way outnumber the first one. So the marketer has a massive list, but it's full of low-quality subscribers who never end up buying from him.

In many cases, he won't even get past the starting line with those folks in his next email campaign. Some of the email addresses are phony, so his autoresponder may choke on those and his undeliverable rate may be high. Even if the emails get through, though, the recipients might consider them spam and complain to their ISP.

But let's assume the email messages make it through, and the recipients actually read them. If the subscribers are not really interested in what the marketer offers, his marketing is not targeted well enough and very few people buy. It's as if he never sent the email in the first place.

The smarter approach is to focus on building a list of quality subscribers over time. A small list of quality subscribers probably converts far better than a huge list full of junk email addresses. A ten percent conversion rate on a list of 10,000 is the same as a one percent conversion rate on a list of 100,000.

And you can take your smarts one step further. You not only should you build a quality email list over time, but you also should segment your master list into targeted lists of subscribers and buyers.

You might have a list for subscribers to your healthy cooking newsletter, and another list for buyers of your healthy cooking ebook, and another list for buyers of your healthy cooking seminars, and so on. When you put those lists together, the total still may not be "large" (whatever that number is to you), but the people on those lists will be hyper-responsive to what you offer. That's your goal.