With the current rate of spam and promotional emails people get all the time, all of the following is getting harder for legitimate marketers:

• Get people subscribe to your list. They are too tired of receiving crap.
• Get people open your mails. Even  if they don’t unsubscribe, they’ll often just delete the mail.
• Keep people on the list. After working hard to attract a subscriber you don’t want to lose them because you wrote something wrong.
• Get people click on links and buy what you offer.

People who tell you building a mailing list and using it as a source of customers is easy, are simply lying (and trying to get you subscribe to their list), or just have no idea what they are talking about.

Still, the mailing list is one of the most sustainable, most responsible, and least expensive ways to build traffic and have your offers seen and heard.

Here’s a list of good resources that will help you get the most of your list – from building it, to sustaining it and getting results from it.

While the resources in each category are not exactly ordered, I’ve tried to put the best ones first so in case you get tired by one topic, you’ll have learned the most important about it. Some of the advice may overlap or even contradict. Marketing is not exact science, you know.

All links open in new window.

List Building, Conversion/Opt-in

Building your list – that’s where you want to start. And if you are working hard or paying for visitors on your squeeze page, you want to make sure the conversion rate of opt-ins is good.

– 20 Giveaways For List Building – This Is Email Marketing On Autopilot – a great list of ideas. Just don’t forget that all these things require time and/or money to create.
– Why List Building WORKS & how I wasted 2 Years – includes a video
– 12 Lead Capture Squeeze Pages Elements of Success – basic but important tips
– Are Pop-Up Opt-In Forms Still Effective? Part 1 and Part 2. I’d be very careful with those as they can increase your site bounce rate. They are very irritating for me.
– How To Build Your Email List Without A Big Website (Video) – includes a video from Jim Cockrum
– List Building 101: Why And How To Build Your List
– How to Build an Email List – 7 “Cs” to Supercharge Your List Building
– 5 Steps You Can Start Implementing Right Now To Explode Your Subscribers Base
– Increase Your Subscriber Opt-In Rate With These Useful Tips
– How To Build Your Email List Fast
– How I Gained 200 Blog Subscribers Fast!
– Build a Email List? – Why & How
– How to Get More Feed Subscribers: 10 Tips
– 12 Ways to Build Your E-mail List
– How to build your email mailing list

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Newsletter Content

If you bombard your list with offers, most will unsubscribe, others will delete and some may even report you for spam. Make sure your newsletter content is useful and interesting or your offers are really amazing.

– How to Write Effective Email Newsletters
– To Write A Top-Quality Newsletter, Study Michael Campbell – a bit old but still valid
– A Way to Repurpose Content and Grow Your Email Marketing List – repurposing content is always a good idea.
– Electronic Newsletter (Ezine) Resources. Usually I don’t recommend using such kind of basic content for your newsletters. In some niches it may work however.
– How To Write An Email Newsletter

Improve readability and open rates

While good content is required, you need to make users open your mails first. Subjects and your reputation will play the big role here.

– How to Write The Best Email Subject Lines. This one is good. Subjects matter the most so I would pay the most attention to it.
– Email Marketing Design – Helpful Tips To Improve Your Email Open Rates
– Write the Perfect Email Subject Line – and again on subjects
– Increase Email Click Through: Avoid Distractions
– 10 Email Newsletter Design Tips
– 6 Rules to Improve Email Deliverability
– Improve your email open rates
– How to Improve Your Email Newsletter Open Rates

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Testing (A/B Testing)

I’ve been stupid not to test for years. In 2010 I started A/B testing and discovered how many of my assumptions were so wrong.
– A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: An Introduction. A must read article by Kissmetrics. Don’t miss it.
– Optimize Your Email Marketing Newsletter through A/B Split Testing
– How to Measure the Effectiveness of E-mail Newsletter Ads
– A/B split testing

Monetization of your newsletter

If you are running a content site maybe you don’t have a product or service to offer. Then read these articles:

– Monetize Your Blog’s Subscriber List
– 4 Ways Video Makes Email Marketing More Profitable
– How to Run a NON-Scummy, Profitable Email Marketing Campaign
– Five Strategies to Monetize a Mailing List

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Miscellaneous and General

These posts don’t fit to specific category or cover more categories at once. They are also good:

– Email marketing: A Beginner’s Guide (PDF inside)
– Email Marketing Census 2011 (PDF inside)
– Internet Marketers’ Dictionary – a good list of words and language you may want to use too.
– What the Gmail Priority Inbox Means for Marketers. With the increasing number of Gmail users you definitely need to read this.
– The Problem With Autoresponders (Video)
– 5 Uncommon Ways to Use Auto-Responders to Grow Your Business
– Email Marketing – Is it Still Effective?. The short answer is yes. For the long answer read the article.
– How to Handle User Unsubscribe to Your Advantage?
– Affiliate Emails: How To Prevent Spam Complaints – very important. You really don’t want to be labeled as spammer.
– Is Your Email List Really Small? Read This Now.
– 6 Goals You Should Have For Your Email Marketing Campaign
– Why Successful Affiliate Marketers Use an Autoresponder
– eMail Marketing Tips – Valuable eMail Marketing Information
– 22 Rapid Tips On Email Marketing For Bloggers
– That’s not SPAM, That’s My Newsletter!

That sums it up for now, but I may add resources over time. If you think there’s anything missing, feel free to comment.

Here is a little quiz which will help you to find out how well is your site optimized for receiving traffic (and generating revenue). I don’t claim the quiz includes everything you could do to optimize your site, but there are for sure some very good ideas that will come to your mind after taking it. At the end you will see the number of points you received (from maximum of 60) and the best answer to every question.

If you want to create such exams on your website, engage visitors and attract links, check out our quiz and exam software. This quiz has been created with it and all calculations are done through it. The software allows also collecting taker’s contact data, creating unlimited exams, splitting users in groups and more.

I have not chosen to require email for this quiz, so if you want, please share your results in the comments!

Some people are just pain and you can’t satisfy them. I’ve had customers who lost hours of my time asking how to install software, how to use it, what other services to use etc., and at the end they asked for refund because they can’t manage with the information. You can do very little with such freetards. The best you can do is either to recognize them at the beginning and refund them before they lost your time or to clearly state that they won’t get a refund and why (you need to have a refund policy or TOS on your site). Of course some can even file a chargeback, but that’s an exception.

Photo by drinksmachine

However there are many genuine customers who may also end up asking for refund because they are unsatisfied with your product or support. In this post I’ll tell you what I do to keep the percentage of such requests very low.

Delivery Quickly

The more your client has to wait, the bigger is the risk she will be unsatisfied and ask for refund. Sometimes the client will not do it immediately but will get dissatisfied when other small problems add up (some minor glitch in the software, hard to understand manual etc). Most people expect instant delivery on digital items and you should aim for that. If for some reason you can’t delivery instantly, it is a good idea to explain how long will it take to ship during the order process and/or in the thankyou email you send after the purchase.

Make Clear and Detailed Descriptions of Your Products

You don’t want people who don’t understand your product to buy it. Don’t think that you’ll make more sales by using superlatives and hiding the disadvantages of your product. The customers who don’t like it will ask for refund and will lose your time complaining that it is not what they expected.

At Calendarscrtips I place online demos of all the products I sell. This is the only way to be sure that customers can see exactly what they are buying. (Well some will not bother to look at the demo but buy and then scream it’s not what they expected. You can send such people to hell).

Offer Good Support

This is a common sense but it’s underestimated by many sellers. Many online products and especially software need to have technical support for bugs, problems or just to help people who can’t manage with the installation and usage.
Instead of trying to test in every possible platform and hope you’ve covered them all, just offer good responsive support to these who have troubles. 99% of them will be happy after you help them and will not even think about refund.

Manuals For Free

If you are selling software, it’s a good idea to offer the installation and usage manual for free download even to non-customers. Many people will check it prior to purchasing to ensure they can manage. Don’t worry about those who will not buy because the manual looked scary to them. You don’t want them as customers. They will waste your time and at the end can still request a refund.

Have a Forum

If you have a forum where customers can talk to each other, discuss the software and the technical aspects of it, this will make them and the visitors a lot more confident that there is someone to help them.

I still don’t have a forum on CalendarScripts but I have a neat comment system for every product which seems to do the job of a forum at this time.

Don’t Overprice and Don’t Go Too Cheap

People are a lot more inclined to complain and ask for refund when they think your product is overpriced. On the other hand, too cheap products attract freetards who expect that you will be their tech support for free.

Try to price your products fairly – accordingly to the effort put in them and to the price of similar products in the market. This will reduce the refund requests.

Be Reachable

If you offer something more than just a contact form people will feel they are dealing with real person and will be more confident they can reach you when they have inquiries. The best thing is to give a toll free phone, although I don’t do it as I am not a big company and do my support myself (I don’t want to be called in the night). However I have published my Facebook visit card and Twitter account and that seems to work great.

These are the most important strategies I can think of at this moment. If you have other ideas, please share!