The point of building email lists is not to collect email addresses. The idea is to have an available pool of prospects for marketing and sales. You want to be able to dip in this pool of customers and prospects whenever you want some money.

It’s like creating your own ATM machine for short term cash or long term profits. Regardless of your list size, you must evaluate the list based on whether you can confidently draw a percent of sales from it at any given time.

Let’s say you have a list of customers who have purchased from you in the past. You are thinking of creating a new product based on feedback from your list. You choose a small cross section of your customer list and send them a series of questions related to your new product idea. Their feedback helps you to create a new product that people actually want.

Manage your lists for maximum profits

When I started out in this business I was very careless about managing my auto-responder lists. I sent out emails to everyone equally. There was no difference between my prospects and my customers.

What I found was that the messages I sent to my prospects were selling the same thing that my customers already had. I was not differentiating between buyers and prospects.

Once someone has purchased from you, they must be immediately removed from your prospect list. You must treat them differently. They are now in a class by themselves and should be treated as such.

When you send out test marketing information to your email lists, never send all your lists the same information. Always reference the unique keywords that got them excited to visit you in the first place. For instance, if they are looking for personalized children’s books, don’t lump them in with the children’s furniture prospects. Or event the children’s clothing prospects.

The art of effective list building requires that you communicate to the list in the unique area of interest they have. In order to approach them about another project you think they might have an interest in, create an opt-in page for your new product and include reference to it in a post to them regarding their own interest.

The amount of profit you make from your email list building will be based on your ability to properly manage your lists. This simple rule never seems to fail to hold up.