Perhaps from understanding what you shouldn't do you might already
be forming an idea about what you should. However, in this chapter, I
am going to expand upon the correct way of building a list of prospects to whom you can market using e-mail.

The first thing is that you have to build the e-mail marketing list
yourself. You have to put yourself in a position where you can invite
people to subscribe to your mailing list and have them do so entirely
voluntarily.

Follow up:

The most common way of doing this is to present a subscription form
on the pages of your business enabled website from where your visitors
can subscribe to your list. Alternatively, you might have a special page on your site which does nothing other than invite subscriptions in this way.

Once people voluntarily subscribe to your list and confirm their desire to do so, you are truly beginning to build your business.

Let us therefore look at how this is done, step by step.

Automation is necessary straight out-of-the-box...

The basic central concept of marketing using e-mail is that once
someone voluntarily joins your mailing list, they have given their
permission to send them information as often as you want to.

This is a fantastic opportunity to present information to this subscriber on a regular basis, because it is a widely accepted fact within the online marketing community that in order to persuade people to buy your product or service, it is necessary to present the idea to them something between seven and twenty times. Hence, if someone
chooses to subscribe to your list and you decide to send only one or two messages, you are going to enjoyed very limited sales success from
what is a very limited amount of effort.

It is far more powerful and it will ultimately be far more successful to send a constant stream of e-mail messages to this prospect in which you recommend products and services relevant to the subject in which you know they are interested. For instance, if you have a tropical fish website and someone subscribes to your mailing list through that site, you immediately know that this individual is interested in matters pertaining to tropical fish.

Hence, you would send them a constant stream of tropical fish related recommendations and suggestions because at some point, it is likely that they will accept your advice and spend money with you.

Once someone has given you their permission to send them
information, you can send whatever you want as often as you like, with
the frequency of your messages being entirely up to you.

There is no generally agreed format for how often you should send
information, with some extremely successful marketers believing that
you should send two or three mail messages every day, whilst others
(the majority) tend to send the same number every week.

But, irrespective of how often you choose to send mail messages to
your list members, the most important point is consistency. If you start off by sending two or three messages every day, then you have to
continue to do so, and the same applies if this is the number of
messages you send weekly.

For the purposes of an illustration, let's assume that you're going to send an e-mail to your prospects every three days.

When you first start your e-mail list building efforts, sending an e-mail to your prospects every three days is not going to cause a great deal of problems, because you have no-one on your list. When you have only three or four list members, it should not be particularly difficult keeping track of where each individual is in the outgoing mail sequence.

But as soon as you start building a reasonable head of steam so that you have a handful of members subscribing to your list every day, then it will very quickly become entirely unmanageable if you're trying to do the whole thing manually.

From the beginning, it is therefore essential that you automate your mailing list building efforts with a tool or resource known as an
autoresponder. The basic dictionary definition of an autoresponder is
that it is a software program that answers your e-mail for you, and
whilst it is true, in online marketing terms, it is more of a central
management tool.

For example, a little further down the line, you could have 1000, 2000 or even 10,000 names on your prospect mailing list, and every one of those individuals will have joined your list at a completely different time. Hence, every one of those individuals is at a different "stage" of the outgoing e-mail sequence but your autoresponder can handle this without any problems.

You must automate from the beginning by having an autoresponder.
We will analyze autoresponder¡¦s in a little more detail later, but for now, all you need to know is how you set this autoresponder up in the beginning.

The first thing that you need to do is create your outgoing e-mail
message sequence. How long into the future you choose to do this for is your own decision, but I would recommend that you have a least the
first three or four months e-mail messages written before you launch
your list building activities.

These messages are then loaded into your autoresponder account so
that they are automatically delivered to anyone who chooses to
subscribe to your mailing list with no further input from you.

You then use the autoresponder to create the subscription form which you will copy and paste onto your website. This subscription form is automatically linked to your autoresponder account so that when anyone chooses to add their e-mail address and name to your form
before hitting the "Subscribe" button, that action automatically sends the information to your autoresponder, not to your standard e-mail
account.

Because of this, the autoresponder is now in a position to take over by sending the first e-mail message to this new subscriber with subsequent outgoing e-mails already loaded and ready to be mailed to their inbox on autopilot.

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