How To Find Out What Your List Wants

The big hairy question for the post today is…. What does your list REALLY want?

The answer? (Wait for it…)

Ask ‘em.  

There's a simple, very appropriate approach to this. It's ask before you blast. Because so often people are just like, "I'm gonna blast out emails. I'm gonna blast out emails."

Not a good idea and a GREAT way to break your list altogether.

I mean, you're marketing off assumption and it's not gonna get you anywhere.

It's the fastest way to getting your email open rates and your click rates down to pretty much zero. So if you don't create a foundation and figure out exactly what your list wants more than anything, then very likely you're just gonna end up ruining your reputation with them and it's not gonna work.

The solution?  

Create a deep dive survey.

A deep dive survey is essentially just a series of open-ended questions, that are designed for pulling out answers you're gonna use as guideposts for your marketing, moving forward.

You wanna find out what they love. You wanna find out what they are pained by. What is something that they want to improve in their life more than anything? What is the one thing that keeps them up at night and the things that wake them up in the morning? These are all very important types of questions that you wanna drill down with them to find exactly what is making them tick.

The sooner you can figure out what your list loves the sooner you can figure out exactly what motivates them to open your emails, but also motivates them to buy, to research, to get excited.

You’ll learn the things that they fall in love with, and THAT shows you how to model your marketing and your messaging. The next thing you know, you're gonna be serving them things that they love, and they're gonna be looking forward to more information, more things that you're actually providing them. More recommendations that you're giving to other affiliates and other authors.

So keep in mind. The more you serve based on what they're confirming and the more you're asking them rather than just telling them, the sooner you're going to be able to convert them into customers as well as get them to fall in love with you and become a lifelong follower.

So now you're probably wondering, “How do I do that?”

How does that all work? You can actually use tools. Very simple is Google Forms. There's Survey Monkey, there's TypeForm, there's all these other platforms that you can use, and very simply just look at the data. Read all the answers, and get a feel for how people are perceiving your brand and how people communicate or how people actively interact with your products and programs.

So one question in particular, “What do you love consuming more than anything else on our site?”

If you have blogs, podcasts, videos, all these different assets that you have available, ask them what they love more than anything. Then lead with what they're telling you. If they love podcasts more than anything, do more podcasts. If they're telling you to do more blogs, go and get your writing team to write a bunch more blogs.

You get it, just let them guide you, and then strategize your next quarter around what they're telling you is their number one thing.

Maybe you're at a point right now where you're struggling with list building or you're curious about how we as an agency actually build lists for our clients, (and we’ve built lists as big as five million person lists for companies ... hell, we've built a million person list in 12 weeks before! I don’t necessarily advise that…)

It was quite the push and it was a whole lot of fun, and crazy, but we did it.

So if you're curious about any of these tactics that we use, we actually put together a blueprint and we put together this beautiful checklist that we are gonna go ahead and give away to you.

There's a link right below. All you need to do is click the link, so you can access that for free and you can get in touch with us and get a stranglehold on what type of list building techniques we use. This is headlines. This is call to action. This is tools. This is all this stuff. And we break it down all in there, I think you’ll like it.

So please, I hope you enjoy that. I hope you enjoyed this post!

I can't wait for you to get the real big list that you deserve, and love to hear how your list building strategies and techniques are going as well.