The key to doing this is to collect people’s email addresses.
And you could say that there are two approaches in this respect.
The first one is a “wide blanket” method. In essence you make it as easy as possible to join your list, and you add incentives to it.
For instance, you have an opt-in box on your website/ blog. Some people offer a free product to incentivise people to join their list. In this method you try to get as many people as possible onto your list.
You’re playing a numbers game whereby you then market to a lot of people, increasing the chances of conversion into sales.
The second approach is a “narrow blanket” approach. In this approach you only want the most passionate of subscribers, to ensure that when you market to them, you market to a crowd that’s ready to buy from you, thus increasing conversion rates.
In this approach you’d make your list exclusive (i.e. someone would need to justify to you why they deserve to be on your list), or even make it a paid list.
You can see the appeal of the second approach, as making it exclusive gives it a halo of speciality, like you’re getting something from this newsletter that you won’t get with other lists.
Obviously, this then means the quality of the content needs to be superb, and the products need to be extremely well vetted.
To get ideas on how to build your list you can visit this post by a guy whose email newsletters convert fantastically well.
Hope that helps.
Jon
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