The First C of Email Management: Collect Names and Email

Obviously, if you never ask for the names and email addresses of your visitors, you aren’t going to be creating a list. So your first important task is to actually get people to give you their names and email addresses.

Are you old enough to remember the Roll-o-dex? You’d collect business cards, and then enter contact information by hand on a tiny card. When you wanted to contact someone, you looked through the cards and found the person. This was how we first did our list management, back in the 80s.

In the 90s we graduated to contact management systems on our computers. But still, data had to be collected in ‘real life’ and entered by hand.

It’s oh, so much easier now! Your management of prospects and customers can be done automatically, and it’s all online. People just need to enter their names and email addresses into a form. No doubt you’ve done this tens of times yourself.

There are a number of ways that people can opt in to your list. The most common way is to provide an opt-in box or form somewhere on your site. Or even to create a separate squeeze page just to collect names and email addresses.

Either one works great - or better yet, use both of these methods!

Your Ethical Bribe

You also want to offer something in return when people opt in. Something related to your business that is of high perceived value.

A digital product is probably the easiest to create and to deliver. You might consider any of the following as a thank you for people when they subscribe to your list:nn* Ecourse (delivered over a number of emails)
* Tips (7 to 15 tips, each in its own email)
* Downloadable pdf reportn* Audio (most often an mp3)
* Videon* Podcast

And since this might very well be your visitor’s first introduction to your material, you might want to show off a bit!

I don’t mean show off as in create a fancy, expensively produced video. I mean that you should over-deliver on your promise. You want your subscribers to think “Wow! This is great stuff!” when they download your free thank you gift.

You create the form, the thank you gift and the autoresponder sequence once, and then it is automatically delivered when someone opts in.

What could be easier?