A lead is someone who has in some way expressed interest in something you have to offer to sale. If you put everything in a funnel with the wide side up, it would look like this: Leads > Prospects > Customers. You’re going to have many more leads than prospects, and many more prospects than customers. When you get a lead your goal is to qualify them, turning them into a real prospect and then converting the prospect into a customer.

In order to do that, you need to nurture your leads from day one. There are many ways to do this. You can start with these ten most important ways to nurture leads and work from there.

1. Start with a Goal – Do you want to increase sales, educate prospects, get people to download your free trial, or do you want to accomplish something else? It’s important to know what your intentions are from the start so that you can design your lead nurturing campaign to fit in with the goal.

2. Edit, Edit, Edit – Every bit of content that you want to be consumed by your leads needs to be edited for grammar, clarity, and format. You want the information you send them free to represent the type of products and services you offer. If you make silly mistakes, they will notice and yes, they will judge you for it.

3. Outsource – If you are unsure about how to set up a lead nurturing campaign, seek out the help of a professional. There are many professionals that can take a look at your goals and help guide you through the process of what type of information you should push out to your leads.

4. Remember the Drip – Don’t send everything all at once to your leads. Instead, practice the drip system of sending just a little bit of information at a time. Tease them, heighten their desires, and make them want what you have to offer before you give it to them.

5. Consistency Wins the Day – Like with the drip, you need to send out messages and information to your leads on a regular and consistent basis. If someone signs up for your email list, they are expecting to get regular, if not daily messages from you. If you make them short, to the point, and informative, they’ll be happy to get the messages.

6. Use Your Blog – Don’t forget about your blog, too. While you will use your email list to send information out to leads, you can also use your blog, and use the blog update feature within your email marketing system to notify leads of new blog posts. Write some of your blog posts directly to leads as the audience.

7. Know the Buy Cycle – Every audience has a buy cycle according to the products and/or services that a seller is promoting. You should have information going out to leads at every stage of the buying cycle in order to qualify them and ultimately convert them.

8. Understand Your Audience – Nurturing a lead is different from talking to someone who has already purchased from you. Ensure that you separate leads from interested parties and from actual prospects or customers. In this way, you’ll be able to target your messages correctly for the audience.

9. Know Your Products – It should go without saying that you need to know your products and services backwards and forwards. Know how a product or service impacts your audience. Also, remember if you outsource some of this work you’ll need to help your contractors understand your products and services too.

10. Study Your Metrics – As they say, nothing is done without the paperwork. It’s very true about lead nurturing. If you want to be certain that what you’re doing is working, go by the numbers. Before you even start, determine what metrics you’ll study to determine success or failure.

When you embark on a lead nurturing campaign, slow and steady wins the race. Deliver informative and engaging information to your leads on a regular and consistent basis and over time you will convert very happy buyers.

Many people get stuck trying to figure out what type of content to send their subscribers via email. But, today there really is no limit to the form in which the email can be sent, so you are less limited by the types. You can send videos, text, beautiful HTML newsletters and more. The types of emails you should be sending via your email list include all of the below but this list is not exhaustive. You should be able to get some ideas, though.

1. Welcome Emails – You should always send a welcome email to explain to your audience what to expect from being on your email list. Tell them how often they’ll get messages from you, plus what type of messages they’ll get.

2. Thank You Emails – Whenever someone signs up, or you have a huge response to an offer, send a thank you to the entire list. It will make those who took you up on the offer feel great and make those who didn’t more curious about the offer.

3. ECourses – An email is a great way to send lessons about how to do something to your audience. You can make a series of emails that give tasks to them on things to do that ultimately leads them to a goal.

4. Promotional Emails – While you do not want every email you send to be promotional in nature, you do want to promote; that’s how you’re going to earn money. Use the other emails as a way to build up to a promotional email.

5. Announcements – If you have a new blog post, new video, new eCourse, new anything to offer your audience, or even some personal announcement to make about your life (when relevant), then you should send an announcement to your list.

6. Newsletters – Having a regular weekly or monthly newsletter is an important component to having a profitable email list. There are many different things you can include in a newsletter, such as a reminder of other emails, blog posts, round-ups of information and so forth. All of these will work very well in a newsletter.

7. Advice – If someone asks a question in person, in a coaching call, on a message board or email, sometimes you can turn it into a message to send out to your email list. Giving advice to everyone on your list about something will add a lot of value to the list members.

8. Educational – One of the things you should do for your list members is to educate them on your niche, which is something they’re interested in. Tell them about problems and solutions that would be of interest to them.

Sending a variety of types of emails via your email list, and in different forms, will keep your audience excited to open each email that you send to them. Pick a few of these types of emails to send to your audience. Test out how each one does in terms of getting opens, click-throughs, and results.

Building an email list is crucial to the survival and advancement of your business. It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business; email marketing is an exceedingly effective form of marketing and should never be overlooked. It is, in fact, one of the most effective forms of marketing that has ever existed. Here are fourteen ways to build your email list.

1. Create Value-Filled Content – While they won’t see the content until they subscribe and open the email, the content needs to be very well written, engaging, and relevant to the audience. You want them to love it so much that they keep opening and that they share your emails with their friends.

2. Make Emails Sharable with Social Icons – It’s easy to add social icons to your email messages now, so be sure to do that. Add that to your email at the bottom, but also add a CTA asking your readers to share the email.

3. Create Segmented Email Lists – The more focused each email list is, the more relevant the messages can be for the subscribers. By segmenting your lists when people make a purchase or click through to answer a CTA, you can make each email much more customized.

4. Create a Lead Magnet – Some sort of incentive is very helpful for getting people to want to give up their email address. However, you should be very careful to make the incentive specific to your target market, to avoid visitors who just want the freebie and have no intention of ever buying anything.

5. Create a Sign-Up on Facebook – Facebook is a great place to add an email sign-up form. You can create a CTA on Facebook easily, and people who will follow you on Facebook will likely want the information you have in your emails.

6. Host a Contest – Contests can be a great way to get more people to sign up for your email list, especially if you run an affiliate contest on a product or service that you’re offering. In addition, you can give people a chance to win one of your books or products if they sign up, share, follow, and like.

7. Create YouTube Videos – YouTube videos are a great way to attract more visitors. They have a lot of built-in viewers who search for things, so create short videos directed toward your audience.

8. Use Creative Twitter Welcomes – You can get software to send automatic welcome messages to people who follow you on Twitter, like SocialOomph. While people complain about them, they’re still effective. Although if you are able to send personal welcome messages by hiring a virtual assistant, please do.

Link to Social Oomph – https://www.socialoomph.com/

9. Conduct Interviews – Find people who need to interview experts in your niche and pitch yourself as a guest. Most of the time when you are a guest you’re expected to bring with you an offer to their audience. This offer can require an email address to receive it.

10. Host a Webinar – Webinars are on fire right now, and a great way to build an email list fast. Everyone who wants to attend the webinar has to sign up for your email list. People see personal webinars as valuable and are more willing to give up their email address for them.

11. Find Joint Venture Partners – Partner up with others to do a multi-person webinar, or host another type of event such as an in-person event. When each of you promote to your own lists, it helps build all your lists.

12. Publish a Book – A physical book or an eBook published via Kindle is a great way to get your name out there as an expert. The book can mention your email list and website too. You can even provide a special landing page for book buyers.

13. Speak Offline – Host or become a speaker at offline events. This works especially well if you do have a physical book to show to people. If you have a good talk, you can get people clamoring to sign up for your list.

14. Paid Promotions – Try using paid promotions on Facebook to collect email addresses, by giving away something free or requiring an email to watch all of a video.

Using these methods will build your email list. You should do all of these methods (although not all at one time) over the course of your business to help build your email list. Keep building the list – never stop. Because the larger your email list, and the more targeted it is, the more successful you’ll be.

Your best chance of success with email marketing is to create a plan based on the products that you want to promote. It all starts with your product funnel, which leads to your content marketing plan, which leads to your email marketing calendar. All email marketing should be focused toward promoting your products and/or services and that requires planning. The following steps will help you increase the results of your email marketing.

Craft a Working Product Funnel – You probably already have various products and services, but you may not have designed a product funnel yet that helps you understand how everything is interconnected and works together. Understanding this can help you keep your different lists and promotions in order.

Design Sales Pages for Each Product – Each page should tell your audience the benefits of purchasing the product. Remember a sales pages focus is on the audience, not on you. Benefits over features, always – pretend you are the client and answer all the questions and concerns they might have right on the sales page.

Start Appropriate Email Lists for Each Product– Using your autoresponder, create the lists for each product or service that you will promote. At the minimum you will want a general email list for people who visit the front page of your blog and then two lists for each product you sell. Create one list for people who purchased the product and one list for people who just want more info about the particular product. Name them appropriately so that you know where to put the messages based from where the audience joins your list.

Develop a New Product Launch Calendar – Knowing when each product is being launched for new upcoming products and or services will help you identify which lists you can include the announcements and information on. Plus, it will remind you to create new sales pages, lists, blog posts and email marketing messages for each new product.

Create a Blog Post Publication Calendar – Based on the product launch calendar, write blog posts and set deadlines for them to be scheduled. Ensure that some blog posts promote the various sales pages, and other blog posts are designed for those who purchased already. For each message, consider who will see it and where they come from.

Create a Social Media Content Publication Calendar – Develop social media messages in a series based on your blog posts that will attract your readers to click through to your sales pages and purchase or sign up for your email lists.

Create an Email Publication Calendar – Based on how everything works together above, create a series of emails that you can edit appropriately for each separate list that you may want to promote the new product to. Load them into the right auto responders, ensuring they link to the right sales pages depending on the audience they are sent out to.

Craft Follow-Up Messages – Don’t forget to craft all your follow-up messages too for each product that you sell. Once sold, you will want to keep in contact with the customer who bought it so that you can market future products and services to them.

By creating a plan of action to follow, you can make sure every single time you launch a new product that you can cross-promote other products and services without bombarding your list too much with messages they don’t need, thus increasing your conversion rates exponentially. If all the content you create goes together like a puzzle to promote all of your products and services in a seamless way, it’ll be that much easier each time to set up for each new product.

Creating an eCourse is a great way to get subscribers to your list. An eCourse is also a great way to give information to your subscribers that they need, as well as a way to market other information to them. It’s important to build trust with your subscribers and you can do that with a well written and planned out eCourse.

But, there are some best practices for your eCourse that you should be aware of when using an eCourse as subscription bait, either free or paid.

1. Craft Well Written Opt-In Messages – Tell your subscribers what to expect in the opt-in information. That way they will know that they’re going to get more than just the eCourse. Letting them know this will do two things. One, it will prepare your subscriber to get more than just the course; and two, it will give them the opportunity to say no or yes. The best subscribers know what they’re getting into when they opt in.

2. Make the Most of Your Thank You Message – Once they opt in, send them a thank you message. This is a great place to include extra information about what they’re going to receive, again, and other opportunities that you have for them. If every single message you send out is packed with information, you’ll be more likely to get a positive response.

3. Craft Your Course Series Carefully – If you’ve promised your subscribers a ten-day email course, each day of the course should be very well defined and stand on its own but also make them excited for the next course delivery. Remember a ten-day course doesn’t have to be delivered one each day; it can be one each week with other information in between.

4. Create Offers within Course Messages – Each course message is a great time to include offers to the subscribers for other products and services or information that you promote. You can send them to affiliate products and services that coincide with what you’re teaching them in the course.

5. Add Extras within the Course Series – A ten-day eCourse can turn into a month of emails with extra days and courses. You can even ask for homework from your course subscribers, sending them to a private Facebook group or forum where they can turn in their assignments to give them extra -all within the same “10 day” course.

6. Give Bonus Course Information – If you want to, you can offer your subscribers the opportunity to sign up for another eCourse series within the current course that you’re providing. Many people are happy to find out about more advanced information about a particular subtopic within the original eCourse.

7. Offer Opportunities to Join Other Lists – If you have more than one email list that might be of interest, the eCourse is an excellent way to let your subscribers know about them. Keeping your subscribers moving through your product funnel by making new offers is a great way to make the most of your eCourse.

8. Periodically Update the Course Information – Even when the course is over, if updates happen, or changes in technology occur, it’s a good time to contact your course members to give them the scoop on the update.

Making the most of an eCourse is essential to making the course worth your time and effort. Thankfully most, if not all, of the email course can be automated using your autoresponder service – whether it’s a free eCourse or a paid course.

Email marketing is an effective way to market your products, services and information to your audience. But, it can be easy to confuse your readers to the point that they do not take action. If you want to improve conversions, consider the following.

Know Your Audience – The best thing you can do for your business is to understand your audience backwards and forwards. The more you know who you’re crafting emails for, the better you can word everything to get the response you want.

Craft Subject Lines That Create Curiosity – Your first line of defense is the subject line of your email. If your subject line doesn’t make the reader curious enough to open the email to read the rest, nothing else matters.

Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines – When someone opens an email, the headline is the first thing they will see after the subject line that enticed them to open the email in the first place. If this doesn’t grab their attention, they probably won’t continue reading.

Use Bulleted Information – Inside the email message, be sure to make the information easy to absorb. One way to do this is to use bulleted information and lists. People read online differently than they read a book. They read vertically instead of horizontally; therefore, make the information match where the eye goes.

Have One Focus per Email – Instead of giving too much information and many options for purchasing something, make your email focused on one item and one offer. You can always upsell and cross-sell at the point of checkout but for the purposes of the email, make the focus on one thing only.

Provide One Link per Email – Don’t overwhelm your audience with ten links to different items in your emails. Instead, provide one link for the focused information that you want to get across to your audience. One link gives them one thing to do.

Know Your Specific Call to Action – If you can identify the one thing you want your audience to do after reading your email then it will be easier for you to design the subject line, headline and email to match.

Keep It Short and Simple – Super long emails don’t translate well because most people just want to know what the point is and move on from the email. Take out extraneous words and get to the point in your emails for faster action.

Understanding that you can increase conversions by being more focused in each email that you send doesn’t mean you can’t promote more than one item in your email messages. However, focusing each message on one promotion will get you further than too many promotions in one email. The reason is that you avoid confusion and increase conversions by telling your audience about one offer at a time.

Once in a while you’ll have someone unsubscribe from your email list. In reality, you want to get some unsubscribes because that means your list is super focused and it might not be right for that particular person. However, the unsubscribe process is also another opportunity to refocus that person and better target your audience.

Follow the Law – By law you must offer an easy to use unsubscribe button. Don’t force them to re-enter their email addresses to unsubscribe. Just give them the button, and let them go without doing so grudgingly. However, you can remind them of why they joined your list at the same time by sending them to a special offer sales page when they click unsubscribe.

Keep It Simple – Don’t make it tricky to unsubscribe. Prepopulate the unsubscribe buttons but also offer the alternatives to the reader to choose different lists or information they may want that might be more accurate for them.

Ask Them Why They’re Leaving – Using the unsubscribe page as a way to find out why they want to unsubscribe can help you better focus your email messages and opt-in offers in the future. Plus, it can give the person unsubbing new insight into what you offer your lists and they may change their mind.

Offer Alternatives – On the unsubscribe page, don’t make them jump through hoops but do offer them some options such as lower frequency of email (such as a monthly option) and/or different newsletters they can sign up for, or other offers that you have that they may not know about.

Take It in Your Stride – It’s really not personal. If you can take the unsubscribe for what it is, a simple request not to get more email from the list they’ve subscribed to and not a personal attack on you, then you’ll be able to handle the unsubs better. Honestly, a clean list is better than a list full of inactive users, so some people are doing you a favor by unsubscribing.

Send High Quality Information – Stop unsubscribes before they start by providing high quality information that is very targeted toward your audience from the start. When someone subscribes to your list, let them know what to expect up front, then be sure to deliver what you promised.

Send a Free Parting Gift – When someone unsubcribes from your list, your autoresponder email will send them an unsubscribe confirmation email which is your chance to say goodbye. Within that you can offer them a parting gift which will then put them on a different list that might be more appropriate for them.

Ask Them to Reconsider – On the unsubscribe page you can also simply ask them straight out to reconsider unsubscribing. Offer them a gift if they stick around a little longer such as one more week or a month. Some people are only unsubscribing because they forgot why they signed up for your list. This is a chance to remind them.

You have to tread lightly when it comes to unsubscribing because you don’t want to make it really difficult and make them jump through hoops to finally get off your list. But, you do want to ensure that you remind your audience why they signed up for your list. Make it clear that you’re sorry they’re leaving, and finally ask them for another chance at pleasing them.

An important aspect of having an email course is finding a way to monetize it. Making money for your hard work is important. When you make money doing something you love, and that you really know how to do, it will enable you to do more of it – thus helping more people learn the information that they need to know.

* Moon Clerk – This works with MadMimi.com, Aweber.com, GetResponse.com and other autoresponder services, which will enable you to collect one-time and recurring payments for your courses. You’ll need a stripe account as well to get started with using Moon Clerk.

Link to Moon Clerk – http://www.moonclerk.com/

* PayPal – You can set up a PayPal subscription payment with a simple link to set up an eCourse, using either ClickBank.com or another shopping cart system. Set up a sales page with the payment option, and then send them to a thank you page with a sign-up sheet. That will sign them up for the autoresponder with the eCourse.

* aMember.com – This is a membership software, which you don’t need to run an eCourse, but it is a good way to set them up to avoid issues with people unsubscribing and still being on the course list, as can happen with the PayPal / ClickBank idea.

* Upsells – A great way to make money from a free email course is to offer an upsell of some kind. This could be a product you’ve shown them that they need, such as a private membership group and other related products to the course.

* Affiliate Programs – Your course may suggest different types of tools, software and services to your audience. This is a good opportunity to include an affiliate link. You do need to disclose in your terms of service on the sign-up page for the course that some links will be affiliate links. However, most people will not mind if you are suggesting things you’ve tried that work.

* Exclusive Offers – People on your list will love feeling exclusive. Use the list to make “list member only” special offers. When you hype up these offers to let them know that they are honestly the only ones getting a “sneak peek exclusive offer” and an inside view of your products and services, they’ll be excited to get the chance.

* Cross-Promote – If you have other offers outside of this course, such as more courses, you can cross-promote. This is an offer that is related to the course your customer is taking, but is not a sale that’s directly related to the course they’re in now.

* Coaching – If you’ve given a good eCourse to your audience, you can offer to give them extra help with one-on-one coaching or group coaching calls for a fee. Make the offer through the course in the beginning, toward the middle and at the end.

If you give it some thought, you’ll be able to cash in on email courses. You can make it as simple as you want, or as complicated as you want, depending on which software you choose to use. But, one thing is for sure; you can make money and get paid for an email course.

An email course is usually delivered in “drip” mode. This means that whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly, part of the course is delivered to those who signed up for it via their email, through an autoresponder service. An autoresponder service like Aweber.com, Mailchimp.com, or another one can get the job done delivering an email course.

Determine What the Purpose of the Course Is

Is this a free or paid course? Is the purpose of the course to encourage your audience to buy something from you when the course ends? If it’s a free course, what will the offer be at the end of the course? If it’s a paid course, how can you deliver exceptional value to your audience and make them feel as if they got their money’s worth?

Decide What to Teach

Teach your audience about or how to do something that is unclear, frustrating or hard to do for your audience. If you’re not sure what this could be, look be ask your audience for the answers. You can ask them directly, or you can find groups where they ask questions. Any question is a likely a good choice for an email course.

Organize the Subject

Choose your topic or question to answer so that you can now organize the subject into subtopics. You’ll want to pick one focused subtopic for each part of the email course. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too much information at one time. Instead, think of it like teaching one point of a problem at a time in a logical order.

Choose How Long You Want the Course to Be

Usually an email course consists of five to seven emails for free courses, but sometimes a topic will require a lot more than that – especially if it’s a paid course. Decide how long, but more than six to eight weeks might be too long. It’s important to consider your audience so that you know how they’ll deal with shorter or longer courses. Making it too long might mean a lot of people don’t finish, but you do want to give enough information that they learn the material.

Tell the Subscriber What to Expect

Before and after the subscriber signs up for the course, you should let them know what to expect. Be explicit about what is in the course so that they’ll know what’s coming and know what to look for. How many emails will be in the course? How often will they come? Will you send other emails and information to them? Let them know what to do if there is a problem. Probably the best place to do this is on the sales page, plus on the thank you page, plus in the first email.

Format Each Email Similarly

You want each email to look like part of the same course by branding it the same. Use the same fonts, images, colors, intro and exit. Always tell them what you have already told them, and then after the body of the email tell them what to expect for the next part of the course. This will help hone their expectations in a way that keeps them interested and involved.

Make Each Email Simple and To the Point

Once you’ve created a template for your course, it will be simple to fill in the details for the course. Give them one strong lesson each email, and keep the emails on the short side – no more than 700 to 1500 words per email. Otherwise it will be too overwhelming.

Craft Subject Lines They’ll Recognize and Open

The subject line is important because it will be key to ensuring that your subscribers know to open the email. You probably want to put the name of the course and the lesson name inside so that they know.

Finally, give your audience a way to report problems and ask questions. You can do that via a special course email address or by making a private and closed Facebook group only for people who have signed up for the course. In addition, you can use eCourse software to help you make an eCourse without having to know any coding or even have a website.

Link to eCourse software – https://coursecraft.net/

The best email subscription forms ask for very little information to start. But, the more personalized the emails you send your subscribers, the more response you’ll get. Therefore, you need to come up with ways to get more information from your subscribers after they’ve already opted in so that you can ensure that you are sending them the right information.

Welcome Message – Right off the bat, when you send your new subscriber a welcome message to your list, it is a great opportunity to seek more information from them using a web form. Depending on which email marketing program you use will determine which features it has to collect more information.

Thank You Page – Another great place to get more information from your subscribers. This can be true of an opt-in thank you page, and a product purchase thank you page. Create a form for the page where your subscriber or buyer can click to provide more information about them to help you serve them better.

 – Periodically, it is helpful to send your list subscribers interactive information such as polls and quizzes. This will help engage your list subscribers in a new way and open them up to providing more information about themselves so that you can personalize your interactions with them even more.

Coupons and Codes – Any time a subscriber takes advantage of a coupon code is a good time to collect more information about them so that you can personalize the information you send them. You may have only collected an email and name when they first opted in but when they redeem the code, ask for just a bit more info.

Request for Response – Sending out an email to your subscribers requesting a response such as a comment on your blog, or for them to fill out a form, or to ask you a question that you’ll answer on your blog, is a good way to get more information about each subscriber that can be used to create more personalized messages.

Surprise Gifts – You probably gave your subscriber a freebie when they signed up for your list. You can use the same tactic in your subscriptions to get more information from your subscribers. Offer them a new free gift for some sort of action taken.

Subscriber Preferences – This is a good way to get more information is to offer your subscribers various preferences they can choose for the type of information they want. If you have more than one type of list, why not give them a chance to get on other lists that you have at this point?

Behavioral – Moving your subscribers from list to list due to the behavior that they demonstrate is a great way to personalize the information that your subscribers receive. For instance, if they click through to buy something, they should be moved to a new list.

Don’t just try one time to get more information from your subscribers. Take time to build the trust between you and your subscribers and as time goes on, ask more questions and seek more feedback from them so that you can make the information you send them more personal than ever before. The more personal your messaging is to them, the more response you’re likely to get.