28

Build An Email List: Priceless Results for You

I recently shared information on how to get started to build an email list. Since then I have had requests from readers to share some real results. As always I am very happy to do that.

The best part of this is that if you don’t know how to do email marketing I am also new to this, so everything I share with you right now is what is happening currently on this website’s email list! If you are new you can duplicate exactly. I have been sharing with you exactly what I have done.




If you haven’t read the previous posts then I suggest you quickly catch up and read why email marketing is so important, what writing an eBook did for me and my latest post which shares how to get started with email marketing.

Build An Email List

So how this been working for me personally? So remember that this website is still quite new, it is now just short of 6 months old. Organic traffic is building up nicely and so is social traffic. (And yes I will be sharing soon on social network marketing very soon too). If you want to know about organic traffic you can read the basics here. I will be expanding on organic traffic soon too…

Anyway back to the topic of actually building the email list and how this is going for me. Here is a screenshot of my aWeber analytics for the last 30 days.

Just to explain what you are seeing here quickly, I signed up with aWeber on the 10th October 2015 and added a sign up form on my website side bar. It was nothing fancy and just said “Sign up here”.

I then started researching how to get started with email marketing and the first snag I hit was that it is really hard to get subscribers unless you offer something of value. This is where writing my own eBook came in.

It took me over a month to write my eBook and get it exactly how I wanted it. It then took me a bit of time to figure out how I would give it away on my website.. turns out it can be as simple as adding it as an attachment to the first email in your follow up series.

Anyway, long story short I got 4 subscribers during the month where I had the boring sign up form with no free offer on my website. Look what happened when I added my free eBook!

Build an Email List

I’m not sure I really need to say anything more on how this has worked for me right? I mean from 4 subscribers to over 60 in less than a month? Yes I know it is probably not the same as what all the online guru’s swear you can do… like 150 000 subscribers in a month. But let’s get real here, do you really still believe what they say? Nothing else has been real has it?

Well this is a real screenshot from my aWeber account over the last month. That graph makes me want to scream with excitement and dance around like a crazy person. How would you like that for your subscribers list?

The best part of that is that is not even the most thrilling part of what I am going to share with you today.

Email Analytics Tools

Here is where I am having the most fun now, checking out the email analytics tools!

I’m not sure if you have heard of A/B testing yet? Well I am busy with investigating how that works and I will be setting it up soon. It looks really exciting and I will share that with you as soon as I have something to show.

Let’s look at sign up forms first

Below is a screenshot of the analytics for the different subscribe forms on this website. I have just taken out the name of the form and where it is on my website. What I want you to see is how different forms perform in different places.

Email Analytics Tools

So the top two sign up forms and the last one are within content on my website. Look how one post gets 22.6% subscribes. I am still quite new to email marketing but that looks great to me!

The third sign up form was an experiment I wanted to do, you see I wanted to check how well Clixsense works if at all. I did write a review on them from the side of making money online paying to click on ย ads. I wanted to see whether they provide any value at all with getting visitors to your website or to get subcribers. I certainly didn’t want to send 10 000 low quality visitors to my website so I made a sign up form, chose the option “hosted by aWeber” and paid $6 to Clicksense to send visitors there.

As you can see it has the lowest conversion rate of all! Yes I know the top one hasn’t had any subscribers yet but I have only just added that form, even when I get one subscriber it will top that 0.2% conversion rate!

The second last form with 4906 displays and 35 subscribers is my sign up form which is in the side bar of my website.

So I have heard that just changing one word or tweaking one color can make an incredible difference in how people react to a sign up form. This is where the A/B testing comes in. I will share my findings with you early 2016.

Let’s look next at the email series I set up and how well that is doing.

Email Analytics Tools email series

So if you read my post on getting started with email marketing you will understand what the email series is about. Here you can see in percentages how many messages reached their recipient, how many opens each message has had and how many clicks.

This is invaluable information and makes it so easy to tweak a headline, change some text or call to actions within these emails. It makes it easy to fine tune my email marketing campaigns and really target my messages so that I am sending out exactly what my readers want.

And now analytics for blog broadcasts

Once again if you are not familiar with what is meant by blog broadcast check out my previous post on getting started with email marketing.

This is also extremely useful. By examining which emails had the highest opens and clicks I can easily see which content my readers love the most and where I should be targeting my attention. This is what showed me how to write this post because my previous posts on email marketing were incredibly successful and I had a lot of readers contacting me because they were hungry for more.

That post was published on Friday and got a 57.45% open rate and a 21.28% click through rate which showed me my readers want to know more about email marketing.
Email Analytics tools blog broadcast

There are loads more analytics and reporting options available within aWeber but I haven’t had a chance to investigate everything yet, as soon as I do I will send that information out too.




What is the quality of traffic from email marketing?

This is another thrilling discovery!ย The results for my aWeber traffic was nothing short of astounding! Overall my bounce rate is 3.23$, with an average of 5.13 pages viewed and 4.29 minutes per session. This is the best traffic I have ever seen on any of my websites. I know exactly where I will be focusing a lot of energy in the next few months!

I hope you have found this information useful, let me know in the comments what you think!

Coming soon will be how to do A/B testing, the results I find which will include colors and power words… keep your eyes open for that!

Are you tired of scams or working online for pennies? Check out my #1 Recommendation!

Everything I have learned to do here has been through aWeber’s training that they provide on their website. Not only are you provided with great tools for email marketing you are also given the training and support to learn how to make your email marketing campaign the best it can be!

getting started guide email marketing

Grab your FREE guide from aWeber

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Lynne

Mommy to a pigeon pair, blogger and online marketer. Lover of chocolate, good books and buckets of coffee.

28 Comments

  1. Hey Lynne!

    I am only starting my blog and think maybe I should wait a bit to get into email lists. I had a ton of fun reading your article and seeing how good your results are with it. Perhaps this should give me some more confidence to start earlier then I had planned with it. I think you are doing great things and I’ll be following your progress now ๐Ÿ™‚

    Thanks again,

    -Anthony

    • Hi Anthony

      I recommend getting started as soon as you can. Of course it can be daunting when you have so much to learn when you first start with your blog, but I do think this is one area that you should put some energy into. As you can see from my previous posts, just a little bit of work in the beginning can mean completely automated marketing in the future. This is really priceless!

  2. That’s really interesting! I haven’t started to e-mail marketing but i’m getting rumors around really often.
    Sems like one of the good ways to go if you can establish it. I may consider entering after enough time and enough threshold of information.
    Thanks for the good post. Really helpfull it was.

    • Hi Tyler

      It s a pleasure, I hope you manage to find the time to get started soon!

  3. Hi Lynne
    This is absolutely amazing.
    I have started a website recently and reading your article on the effectiveness of e-mail marketing has certainly got me all excited.

    I have only got my site for just over 4months and my traffic is very very slow. I am also considering writing an e-book. Do you recommend this avenue for me? or should I just focus on building my site with focus on an e-mail campaign?

    From your results, it looks like sign up forms placed in a widget yields the most subscribers. And with Clicksense the lowest conversion. That is very interesting.

    I will be checking up to see your results on the A/B Testing.

    You got some fantastic information here. I learnt a lot.
    Thanks
    Roopesh

  4. Very interesting article on growing an email list. As I can see you achieved some good results using tracking tools. You now know which method makes you the best results and this is of course a priceless information. You’re saved from wasting your time on useless things and can now focus on what will help you build your list much faster. I agree that visitors that come from your email subscription is the most responsive audience which means most of your efforts should be spent in that direction. Thank you for sharing this priceless info.

  5. Very informative Lynne, I’ve been thinking about email marketing for a while but didn’t know when to start, my site is only about 6 weeks old so it’s very much in it’s infancy and I didn’t want to start directing too much traffic there while it was still under construction as they may be put off, when would you recommend I start?
    Thanks

    • Hi Dan
      Congrats on launching your website, I wish you lots of success!

      I say get started as soon as possible. Remember that just because people are subscribing doesn’t mean you have to send them loads of emails ๐Ÿ™‚ You can start building your list now and only send a few emails until you have your plan in place and more contact. The point is that any visitors to your website now might never return, but if they subscribe you have a way to be in contact with them and bring them back to your website.

  6. This is a great article and the first time I can remember seeing actual e-mail analytics. You are right about the e-mail list & bonus. It’s something I want to do for my blog that I just started but haven’t done it yet. For starters, I still need to create an e-mail list and the sooner the better.

    • Hi Josh
      I’m pleased you enjoyed my post. I have really found the growth and information so exciting I just had to share it. Let me know if you need any help Josh!

  7. Great stuff Lynne! I just started with aWeber so this information came with perfect timing. So awesome how your sign ups increased after giving away and ebook. This proves that people are looking for more in depth information and the results show.

    • Hi Luke
      Congrats on getting started with aWeber, let me know if there is anything I can help you with! Make use of their training, they will send you things via email but you can also go and find all sorts of training videos and eBooks on their website too. I make use of this because I can’t wait for things to be sent to me.

  8. Lynne,
    Will start email marketing in January of next year. Too much on my plate during the holidays. You have a very detailed list of what you have done and I like the tracking of statistics, this keeps you moving in the right direction.
    John

    • Thanks John!
      I know what you mean about this time of year, it looks like everything on my side will be grinding down to a halt. Well everything except children and Christmas! When you get started with aWeber let me know if I can help you with anything.

  9. I never knew that emails are so important. I will definately start with email marketing aweber sounds the way to go thanks so much!!

    • It is a pleasure Joe!
      Well aWeber is the best choice I could find, but maybe there is another email autoresponder that you will enjoy too.

  10. Hi Lynne,

    This post is so valuable for people who want to start an online business. Email marketing seems to be the way to go to establish a genuine full time business online. You’re off to a great start and we’ll be following you to see your success.

    May 2016 be your most prosperous year ever!

  11. Lynne – this post has been open on my browser for a good week now and just waiting to be read and digested. I am currently in the stage of building an email list and will be carefully going through your advise here soon. Will keep you posted – thanks!

    • Hi Shaz
      I am so glad you found this post about email marketing useful ๐Ÿ™‚ I will be sharing more on this soon, I find it so incredibly exciting! Is there anything you need help with?

  12. Lynne, I just stopped back by to see what was news on your website. I have bookmarked your site as you are a great source of information for anyone thinking about starting or already has an internet marketing business.
    My best advice I could give your readers is to sign up now for your email newsletter and they will get all your latest news delivered right into their mail inbox.
    I have been at this for just 3 months now with Wealthy Affiliate and I can tell your readers, by following your suggestions and recommendations and the excellent training and support WA offers, my website is already showing an increase in traffic and conversions. AWeber email marketing program is now a key part of my business strategy. I signed up for their 30-day trial offer and was amazed at their training, support and products the offer to help your business succeed. I just downloaded their booklet Growing your business with email marketing to share with my readers.
    Back to work now, thanks for all you do. See you on the inside.
    Bob

    • Hi Bob
      Great to hear from you again! I’m glad you are making use of aWeber’s free trial and that it is working for you ๐Ÿ™‚ They have loads of training resources on their website that I haven’t had a chance to work through yet. I am so excited it get cracking with it, but have to wait until mid January 2016 when my kids are back in playschool. Not a chance I will be getting much done until then.

  13. Hi Lynne,
    This is something I really know I should be getting into, but I have no idea how. I don’t know what I would include in an e-book to my readers. I had a friend make a suggestion that I should at least do it so that people get notified when there is a new post on the website. Then I could figure out the ebook stuff later. I just find it really hard balancing a full time and keeping up with my post frequencies that I have no idea when I could make the time.

    • Hi Jessica

      I know exactly what you mean! I have 4 websites and it is hard to keep up with everything. That is the beautiful thing about email marketing. Once it is set up it basically runs itself and keeps working for you… so that little bit of effort to get started goes an incredibly long way!

      Check out this post here about Getting Started with Email Marketing to get a better idea.

  14. Hi Lynne,
    Thanks so much for the wonderful lesson, but I personally do not like email marketing, however your post is very encouraging to start email marketing.
    Thanks for so much insight.

    • Hi Lanu

      Yes, there are loads of positives to starting an email list! Let me know if you have any questions.

Comments are closed.