Building an email list is one of the most effective ways to promote affiliate products, your products, and services.
There are many terms that people use when they talk about list-building. Here are the list building common terms you need to familiarize yourself with.
List Building Common Terms
So, if you are new and unfamiliar with list-building, here are the common terms of list-building.
Email list
This is a collection of email addresses of the people who opted to receive your emails. You offer something valuable to these people, and they give you their email address in exchange. You can send these people emails, which can be educational or promotional.
The idea here is to collect as many emails as possible but ensure that these people are interested in what you say.
For example, collecting emails from people who want to lose weight and emailing them about how to start a blog is pointless.
How to build an email list for affiliate marketing.
Optin page
This page allows people to opt into your list and become subscribers. Usually, it is a page with input to collect email addresses.
You can create an opt-in page using HTML, as I did. You can learn how to do it here or create one using an opt-in page builder like Systeme.io.
I created one in systeme.IO, and you can download it here.
The other name for the opt-in page is the squeeze page.
Lead magnet
As the name suggests, this is a magnet that will attract leads to subscribe to your email list, and this can be a PDF, audio, a video, a resource page, a coupon, or anything that can incentive people to give you their email address to get the information your lead magnet provide.
A lead magnet needs to be precise and solve a specific problem your prospects might have. How you deliver it does not matter if it solves someone’s problem.
Autoresponder
This software has three main functions: store emails you collect from your prospects and send them automated and one-time emails.
You can learn how to start email marketing for beginners here.
If you’re a beginner, the best autoresponder is Aweber.
Best autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Open rate
This is the percentage of people in your email list who open your emails. If you have 100 and 10 people open it, you have a 10% open rate.
Most marketers get about a 10% open rate, but when you get better, you should strive to reach at least a 20% open rate. If you can get over 50%, you can call yourself the email marketing master.
In the above example, I sent an email to 268 subscribers, and 56 of them opened the email, which is a 20.9% open rate.
Click rate
This is the percentage of people who click any links in your email. This is a very important metric because it will show how people respond to your messages.
In the same email, I showed you that only eight people clicked the link, which is a click rate of 3%.
Unsubscribers
Some people are no longer interested in receiving your messages. By law, you must include an option to unsubscribe to every email you send, and all reputable autoresponders have this feature.
Having unsubscribers does not mean you are bad at sending emails ( yes, sometimes it is true).
Sometimes people do not want to read your messages anymore, or they are not interested in your offers, do not take this personally it is business, and not everyone will like you.
The idea is to promote your opt-in page so many people can join your list.
If the number of new subscribers is higher than the number of unsubscribers, you are growing, which is the most important thing.
List cleaning
This is when you remove the email addresses of people not engaging or reading your email.
You need to do this for two reasons. First, most autoresponders will charge you depending on the number of emails you have, so if someone is not reading your email, just removing their email address can reduce your costs.
The second is that it will lower your metrics, like clicks and open rate. Some autoresponders will penalize you for this. If you use a high-end autoresponder like Convertkit or ActiveCampaign, having a high open rate and click-through rate is very important.
I clean my list every Sunday, and the criteria is if someone has not opened or read my email in the last 90 days, they probably do not want to be emailed by me, so I remove them.
Most autoresponders have filters where you can figure out who opens and reads your emails and who does not.
Final words
Those are list-building common terms; if there is a term I did not define here, you can comment below, and I will add it.
Thank you for reading.