List maintenance is one of the most important subjects in online marketing. Your list is your number one and most basic bottom level output for your promotions. It‟s expensive and time consuming to gather, but forms one of the most powerful resources and profit potential you have. For this reason, we need to understand exactly how it works. Throughout my time in online marketing, I‟ve tried many different formats. There are clear differences that allow some methods to come out on top, while some fail miserably. Depending on your business, there are several solutions that might be right for you. For this reason, we need to look at the big five to allow you to decide which one is going to make you the most cash.
Let‟s discuss the various methods of list maintenance that have proven successful for many marketers, and the up sides and the downsides that come with them, because to be totally honest with you, there's no way me, or any other person or guide can ever tell you what‟s best in this situation without knowing you, your business, and your future plans, and what you're going to use your list for. Please understand that this is no technical report. I won't be showing you around auto-responders or telling you the best ones to use, or how to use them. No, this is far more important, and will generally form the shape of your future promotions and of course how successful they will become, and in what way. So without further ado, lets get talking about the fundamentals and the type of things you should be looking at for a start. During this guide we'll be looking at how each management technique affects your response rate, your customer loyalty, the amount you earn from your list, and what type of promotion it's suited to, such as your own products, joint ventures or purely affiliate marketing. We'll also take into account the money you can earn from selling ads to that list, which isn't quite as important as you may think right now.
So, lets get started. The number one thing that I need to tell you right now, before we even look at these methods is to make 100% sure that the people signing up know what they're getting themselves into. For example, how many e-zines or newsletters have you ever subscribed to only to find out that they're not actually e-zines and newsletters, just ad lists (which to be honest aren't all that bad in particular situations, but we'll be getting to that in a moment). The choice you make now will shape your business far in to the future, but more importantly whatever you tell your customers and subscribers they'll be getting will shape your response rate considerably, and that's obviously something we'll want to take into account from the very start. So there we have it. Rule number one, never tell your customers they're getting something then deny them that, or send them things that they haven't requested or didn't know about, because not only will that get you into trouble, but it will also affect the loyalty and trust these customers and subscribers have with you, which is so important.