Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

There’s a whole new buzz about list building in 2010.

I’m not sure why. Building and nurturing a mailing list (nurturing being the keyword there) should be the #1 priority of any online business. It is hands down the most valuable asset your online business is ever going to have.

If your advertising campaigns go down the gurgler… if you loose your search engine rankings… if you loose your top affiliates to a competitor… or whatever… your mailing list is always there and simply a click away.

So I thought I’d share the story of how I build one of my very first mailing lists of over 24,000 leads at absolutely no cost in under a week.

Way back in 2001-2002 I developed my very first software application.

Well, I designed it and found someone in the Ukraine (of all places) to program it for me and actually “make it work”. I don’t do programming.

I had the intention to give this application away in order to generate leads (build a newsletter mailing list) and gain favor from those leads by giving them something of value for nothing.

I was putting the “good karma” out there.

NOTE: The principal of this story can be applied to ANY lead generation tool you decide to use – it’s not exclusive to giving away software. Whenever I mention software what I am really saying is “giving away VALUE”.

This software application was one of the very first “split run testing” applications ever released to the small to medium sized online business owner market.

It was very crude, butt ugly, but it did the job.

It also had a really ugly name…

“The Scientific Internet Marketing Assistant”

In essence, it would rotate two (or more) different website pages whenever visitors clicked on a single link. Half would be sent to page 1 and the other to page 2 and so on.

It also had a conversion code that could be placed on a “thank you page” to track conversions, and it had basic statistics. This would allow the user to see, as a percentage, how well a certain page was converting visitors into leads / sales etc.

Any visitors that returned through that single link would also be redirected back to the same page they originally saw. That way the results would not be skewed with exposure to both pages, and the stats were a true reflection of the best performing sales page.

Anyway, if you know split run testing, that’s what it did.

But again it was very rudimentary.

The thing is it had value.

It had real value to anyone wanting to test different sales letters or squeeze pages and see which was the better performing.

It allowed the user to increase their profit margins – and I was giving it away.

The idea I initially had was to offer it to our website visitors (and our small mailing list at the time) and hopefully it would gain some traction and go viral. Obviously, in order to get the download, a name and email address would be required.

Of course, if you’ve ever tried viral marketing it’s not as simple as it sounds.

You need to reach a point of critical mass before something takes on a life of its own – and that generally means you need to give it a huge injection of initial exposure to make that happen.

And understand this was back in 2001 – well before the whole “social marketing and networking” craze. Heck back then it was all about MORE traffic (not split testing). This was when you could keyword stuff to get top Google rankings over night.

My, how things have changed.

The trouble is you need to already have a large enough audience yourself, or you need to aggressively promote the lead generation tool to a large enough audience via paid advertising (etc.) to give it the necessary traction.

That’s when the idea dawned on me.

If I was going to use this as a lead generation tool – it would be pretty useful for a few other strategic partners in my industry to also use it to generate leads of their own.

Ultimately I hoped to get the bigger newsletter publishers of the time to “mention it” to their readers as a valuable free tool. However, by giving them an incentive to do so, it was literally guaranteed to get them to push it out to their mailing lists.

Heck. It was a free valuable tool anyway. If it was going to give them some extra exposure for their own businesses it became a no brainer.

So that’s what I did.

The interesting twist here is that I didn’t have a paid product to add on the backend – so I didn’t have a revenue generation angle to offer. Instead…

I contacted around 10 different newsletter publishers at that time and offered to plug their newsletter subscription form onto the backend of the “thank you page”.

That way anyone coming to download the software would…

1. Enter their name and email address to get the download (mailing list one)…
2. Be automatically subscribed (unless they unchecked a box) to my own marketing newsletter list (mailing list two) on the front end…
3. Be sent to a thank you page on the backend. This offered several other newsletters of interest that they could subscribe to if they desired – these of course were the partner’s newsletters.

…if you think “co-registration” then it’s the same deal only we were not paying for the new leads and neither were the partners.

All of this was automated of course – anyone that went on any partners mailing lists did so automatically. They simply needed to check boxes next to the respective newsletters they wanted to receive and click a subscribe button.

There are plenty of applications out there now that allow you to do this – but back then I had this custom programmed as well – again, remember we’re talking 10 years ago here so there were not many “off the shelf” solutions.

NOTE: To sweeten the deal I also had a permanent page built into the software that advertised the partner’s newsletters. That meant that anytime the user logged into the software application to create new campaigns, or check their statistics, they could check out the “useful newsletters” page and potentially become a lead for any newsletter they were not yet receiving. Key point here is to try and over deliver for your partners.

By using this approach I was able to gain 6 different partners that had a total of something like 800,000 readers combined across all 6 newsletters. If I dropped names here you’d probably recognized a couple I’m sure.

The condition however was that each partner had to send out a solo announcement offering the free software to their readers – rather than just a brief mention in their regular newsletters.

This was about maximum exposure.

The end result of this campaign…

I built a mailing list of 24,000 new readers to my marketing newsletter.

I also built a separate mailing list of about 28,000 – this was for the software update mailing list only –  some people did uncheck the auto-subscribe box to our marketing newsletter.

This all happened in just under 10 days.

On top of that each partner averaged around 2,500 new leads for their own newsletters.

Was I happy?

You bet I was.

Were the partners happy?

You bet they were.

For a one time mailing to their newsletter lists – sharing something that their own readers would’ve appreciated knowing about anyway – they generated, on average, 2,500 new readers to their own lead funnels.

If the lifetime value of each new lead was worth just $1 buck – well you see the value.

Is this still applicable in 2010?

Sure it is.

You could roll this out EXACTLY as I’ve described above.

Is it as easy as it might sound?

Of course it’s not.

There’s work involved.

You have to develop your lead generation tool.

You have to secure key strategic partners.

You have to set up the co-registration system etc.

NOTE: There’s your “to do list” by the way.

However, it’s friggen worth it man.

If you’re going to use a lead generation tool for your own business – why not allow complementary businesses to benefit from it as well in the same way?

The real key however is in delivering value.

Your lead generation tool needs to have REAL VALUE. First and foremost for the new leads you’re giving it too, and secondly, to absolutely WOW your key partners into participation.

I can’t stress that highly enough.

The only reason this technique would fail is if you’re trying to peddle crap. I had a good one here, in that it was one of the first of its kind. It was unique.

However, it doesn’t have to be unique, it simply needs to have real value.

Something which you could easily attach a price tag too and have many happy customers satisfied with their purchase.

If I were to roll this out again…

I would look to incorporate a social networking component into it (i.e. retweet about this free software).

I would also probably include a social bookmarking component (“digg.com this”).

If possible, and there was a backend product on offer at the time (I wasn’t selling anything back then – just building a mailing list and working affiliate offers) then I would certainly offer partners a commission on any orders that resulted as well.

Partners would get free leads, commissions, and kudus from their readers for sharing something of value.

Provide real value in your lead generation tool.

Provide as much value to your key partners as possible and you literally can’t go wrong.

Now I know I said I did this at no cost. I guess that’s not entirely true (but I’m not trying to mislead you). Other than the work involved which obviously has a time factor cost, it did cost me about $1,000 to have the application programmed.

However, I consider this to be no cost because I had planed on giving it away anyway – the difference is I decided to give it maximum leverage by putting this unique twist on things.

This is something you should seriously consider.

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