Let’s say that you are absolutely nuts about golf, and you have decided to follow your passion and build  an email list around the subject. Imagine that at this point you have built your email list up to 100,000 leads and that you have several products in your pipeline, which you plan on release in the near future. This could include a product on weight-lifting for golf, a product for improved driving, and a product for achieving putting perfection.

A simple way to market these 3 products would be to create an email campaign for each product and send the entire campaign to every one of your subscribers. Of course even with such a simple strategy you would want to make sure to spread out each campaign. No list will respond well to being constantly bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch, and padding the space in between pitches with informative, and preferably unique information, on golf can only help your credibility in the eyes of your list.

A more complicated marketing strategy would be to divide up your list into a main list with several sub-lists. So you might send an email to your main list telling them that you have special information for anyone interested in efficient weight lifting for golf, which will add yards to their drives and fairway shots, even without a touch of improvement to their technique! This email would contain a link for anyone interested to follow.

Anyone who clicks on this link will be brought to a second opt-in page where they will have the option to become a member of the sub-list for “weight-lifting for golf.” Of course I would not advise you to use the term “sub-list” anywhere on this web-page, just some brief information to pique there curiosity, and get them to sign up.

Once your “weight-lifting for golf” email marketing campaign is completed you can send it to your sub-list. Please not that by campaign I mean a series of 5 to 7 emails designed not to inform but specifically to sell. At the same time you send your campaign to your sub-list you can send a brief series of sales letters, between 1 and 3 to your main list to try to encourage some extra sales.

Breaking up your email list in this way tends to cause better results in terms of conversion rate as opposed to treating all members of your lists as equals. You are always going to get a higher conversion rate emailing to your list of pre-qualified golf leads then you would to a list of 100,000 members of the general public. The reason is that your list represents leads that are pre-qualified based on the specific interest of golfing. It is the specific interest of the lead that gives it its value, and in a market as wide as golfing related products, there are bound to be even more specific interests which can be unearthed.

 

*This article was originally published as a post on February 8, 2008.