White Hat Crew
White Hat Crew • for Ethical Internet Marketers
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WHC Internet Marketing Guide

List Building

No matter what else you do in internet marketing, you'll want to build a mailing list. Why? So that you can get repeat customers.

One of your goals as a marketer is to minimize the time, effort, and expense required to make a sale. One of the best ways to do that is to build a list of people you can email information and offers to.

As you build a mailing list, be sure to provide value to them by sending truly useful information and perhaps giving them freebies from time to time. By giving, you'll earn their trust and keep them interested in reading your emails. If all you send them is sales pitches, they'll be less likely to buy and more likely to unsubscribe.

Be careful not to send too many freebies though, especially in the beginning, or you'll train your subscribers to expect everything from you to be free.

It's critical to build your list using only "opt-in" methods. If you send commercial email to people who haven't consented to receive it, you can run afoul of anti-junk-email laws.

Even better for protecting you than opt-in (though it will reduce the size of your mailing list somewhat) is double opt-in, which means that after they submit their email address to your list, you email them a confirmation link which they have to click to verify that they want to subscribe. Without double opt-in, it's possible that you'll get people on your list whose addresses were submitted by someone else.

Any decent list building service or software will support double opt-in and will help you keep on the right side of the law.

Mailing List Building Systems

There are three main classes of mailing list building systems:


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