Get List Quick, Part 2

Paid Advertising and Affiliate Marketing are the two most effective strategies for growing your email list quickly. And both require an effective free optin, so the third strategy mentioned in Part 1 of putting an optin form on your site or social media could be adapted from that.

Part 2 here focuses on the best practices for paid advertising and the best practices for affiliate marketing.

Best Practices for Paid Advertising to Grow Your List

1. An effective lead generation campaign must have an effective optin offer. This should go without saying.

This should be a free piece of content that is valuable to your customer. There is endless advice from much more creative and intelligent marketers online about what to use as your optin offer, so I won’t rehash that here, except to say that one of our favorites is to use a live webinar because of the urgency to attend.

2. Strategically, it is less important what you use as an optin than what you do next.

The holy grail of paid advertising lead generation campaigns is what is called a “self-liquidating offer.” (We first heard this term from Russel Brunson, though I doubt he invented it.) Basically what it means is that whatever revenue you make from a sale that follows the paid lead generation in a direct funnel pays for the ad spend that brought a customer in. If you are seeking primarily to grow your list with “free” or at least very low-cost leads, reinvesting all your revenue from a given funnel is a great way to do it.

Our experience with self-liquidating offers is that they often take some experimenting to get right, and once they’re in place they have a lifespan of 6-18 months before the lead cost begins to outpace the revenue.

3. You will want to have sufficient budget and time set aside to get the paid advertising funnel right.

Since you’re reading an article about growing your list quickly, this admonition may come too late, but it’s worth keeping in mind. The only way to know for sure what will work is to try it out, and sometimes the market surprises you and your best effort comes to naught while your throw-away effort blows up. That can be expensive, and it is a good policy to give a test campaign at least two weeks and $500 to see if it might be viable to try to scale.

4. Work with someone who specializes in the platform you’re advertising on.

The importance of this cannot be overstated if you are serious about growing your list through paid advertising. Ad platforms and algorithms are changing on at least a weekly basis, so it takes someone who is in that system every day and spending a lot of money to know how to use it in this moment. (Unfortunately for your budget, our experience is that it can take a month to discover whether an agency is performing as well as they should be.)

This is the reason that this post does not cover anything platform specific, nor any particular tactics for getting the most optins. Tactics come and go, and we are not experts in paid advertising — we are experts in marketing strategy, and we love to work with our experts in paid advertising!

Best Practices for Affiliate Marketing to Grow Your List

1. Your offer should be both timely and relevant to your affiliate’s audience.

Don’t use an evergreen optin for an affiliate mailing if you can avoid it. Try not to send an affiliate mailing to an evergreen funnel either. The reason is that their list will be much more responsive if they know there is some urgency to following the links in the affiliate’s email, and both you and the affiliate want the list to respond.

It should go without saying that “relevant” does not mean “competitive” — most affiliates will not send something out that is too close to one of their own offerings.

2. Have a decent commission available for the product you’re selling.

It isn’t in your affiliate’s interest to send an email out to their list that grows your email list (thereby decreasing in some way their monopoly on their audience’s attention) and gets them 30% of a $15 product. Really, any product below $197 or so should not be offered as a commissionable product for a major affiliate. It’s just not worth anyone’s time!

3. Have terms that are fair to you and get your affiliates paid as soon as possible.

4. Include your contact information in a P.S. of the affiliate email copy.

One of the more effective ways to irritate your precious affiliates is to cause them to receive hundreds of support tickets when the link in an affiliate email they’ve sent doesn’t work (when you are actually at fault) or their audience has a question about the optin offer. Yet surprisingly few affiliates think about this ahead of time. So be their hero and preemptively give their list an easy way to reach you with all of their questions.

5. Take care of your affiliate relationships.

This is a broad statement, but what I’m referring to is a level of respect for the social capital involved in affiliate relationships. You shouldn’t ask too frequently for them to send. You should have the self-respect to not accept a bad trade with them that requires you to promote their product 3 times for every time they promote yours. You should have the self-respect to not give them more than a 75% commission in the absolutely most desperate circumstance, and to usually give no more than 50%. You should only send them offers that you genuinely think their audience would resonate with. You should give them all the materials they’ll need as far in advance as possible, and make it easy for them to find them. You should be transparent with your accounting if they are curious, and also not overload them with information they don’t need.

Remember: your affiliates are giving you an incredible gift. They are telling their hard-won audience that you are trustworthy. So be worthy of that trust, and these relationships will be profitable for years to come.