You built up a list with painstaking effort and initially, you are quite happy with the click rate. For a fresh list, it's not unusual to get a click rate of between 15 to as high as 25 percent.
So you sent them one email, followed by a series of follow up emails, hoping that they would respond and buy something from you. But by the time the third or forth email is sent out, you notice that the click rate has dropped dramatically.
Worse, your partners start to stay away from you because they know that you do not have a responsive list. A less responsive list means less clicks, and other marketers are wary of that. It means less traffic for them if they are to work with you.
So how did it happen? Why are people clicking less and less? Why do they open the first email (click rate as high as 50 percent), but fail to open the rest of the emails? After a while, your list becomes stale. Even a huge list wouldn't save you because if you can't get them to respond, you're not going to make any sales.
Let's take a look at what is happening here.
Usually, a subscriber joins a list hoping to download to free materials. This may be in the form of a free ebook, report, video or audio file. The format doesn't really matter. What the subscribers want is value. They want to download materials that they will find useful, so they join your list.
Of course, for any new subscriber, they don't know what they will receive because they don't really know you. And since it's a free offer, they are willing to give you the benefit of doubt and download some stuff.
In other words, it's very important that you send out your best stuff because at this early stage, what most people do is to make a quick assessment of what you have to offer. If they don't think that you have something valuable to offer down the road, they will either stop responding, or they will unsubscribe from your list. For this reason, never ever send rubbish to your subscribers. Don't hit them on the hand with offer after offer until they get so sick and tired of hearing from you.
Instead, start by generating a relationship with the subscribers. Offer genuine value, and once they know you better and get a sense of who you are, you can start recommending some offers.
You started a list to make money, so by all means recommend some products. But don't do that at the expense of jeopardizing the relationship between you and your subscribers. It's just not worth it in the long term.
If you do it all wrong, and your list stopped responding altogether, you may have to start all over again and build a new list. That's the worst case scenario. To prevent that from happening, start sending out high quality content from day 1!
Darren Chow is a full time article marketer and SEO specialist who has helped hundreds of clients promote thousands of websites. Join the
article marketing newsletter to find out more about how he gets sites to rank well in the search engines.
