Our Email Marketing Trade Checklist – Dangers, Pitfalls and Warnings
One of the best ways we’ve found to build traffic and an email list is to partner with websites that have the audience you want to capture. The larger we grow, the more people approach us to do the same thing. It is a fantastic way to grow your list with the right type of people (buyers) and get a spike in traffic at the same time.
But (there’s always a “but”), trades or barters are fraught with danger. You want to make sure the partnership is fair and you get a similar amount of new subscribers and traffic. Your email list is your money-maker and should never be traded lightly.
Follow this short checklist with every marketing barter and you’ll stay out of trouble. Our policy is that my partners have to agree to all of these points or no deal.
1. NEVER actually send your list to anyone else. Besides being a major breach of your subscribers’ trust, your list is sure to get out into the wild and lose value immediately as it gets passed around to all your competitors. Instead, you will be sending a message to your own list on their behalf through your own email system. They never actually get to see the list.
2. Write the email yourself in your own voice. Sometimes the partner site will want to provide specific html code for their email. That’s a deal-breaker for me – and it won’t work for them anyway. “We’ve tested this email and it works great!” they’ll say. Well they haven’t tested it with my list and I know what works. If you’ve been sending emails written in your own voice for months and then hit them with some big block of graphics, two things will happen. It will get very little response and you’ll get lots of unsubscribes. Neither is a happy thing.
Instead, offer to take a list of bullet points they provide and work it into your own email that matches the voice, relevancy and length your list is accustomed to getting. Your partner will get a much better response rate and your unsubs will remain at the normal rate.
3. Match dedicated email for dedicated email. This means if I send a dedicated message to my list, my partner will do the same. We don’t send newsletters with lots of links to lots of different pages so we’re not able to do newsletter mentions for newsletter mentions. Newsletter mentions are crap anyway and never result in traffic.
I’m still kicking myself for not following this rule early on. We were offered a mention in a newsletter that supposedly went to 129,000 subscribers in exchange for two dedicated emails to our list of 5,000. Surely, I thought, 129,000 subscribers would result in some clicks! Our two dedicated emails to our list resulted in 624 clicks to their site. Our newsletter mention in their email resulted in exactly 26 clicks. We got ripped off.
4. Check out the landing page your subscribers will be sent to. We’ve turned down several trades simply because I didn’t like the page they were sending my subscribers to. It’s not that they were offensive or irrelevant. It’s that they didn’t have a strong call to action. I want my partner to get a great response rate, but actually, that’s not my biggest concern. As we’ve mentioned many times, we train our list to take action when they receive an email. If they are taken to a page that doesn’t get them to take action, they are less likely to take action the next time I email them even though it is an email about something completely unrelated to the previous email. It’s a scientific fact. OK, well not scientific, but I know it to be true. We’ve monitored response rates from email to email and those with unexciting landing pages previously had lower response rates for the next message. Meaning, we’ve had to re-train the list again to take action.
This leads us to the most important consideration…
4. Trade on quality of list – not pure numbers. Our lists, because of the way we develop them, grow them, train them and get rid of non-action-takers quickly, are AWESOME. Sorry to brag, but it’s true. I would put the responsiveness of my 5,000 against most lists of 50,000 or more any day. But most people don’t work their lists like we do. We have lists of buyers, not subscribers. So rarely will I trade lists on straight numbers. This ruffles feathers occasionally but tough donuts.
Our lists are GOLD and if we do a trade with you, you’re going to get some unbelievable response rates and I want the same from my partner lists. Unless I know how a partner site has developed their list and has the same philosophy as we do about it, we’ll normally need them to mail to at least 25,000 people to get similar conversion percentages.
Sometimes its hard to discuss this one without sounding like, “Your list sucks and ours rules!” but it has to be done. In the end, they are believers and are more than happy to trade again (usually sooner than we are).
The Interview Income blog is written by Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. The Interview Income Blog is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
