What's the Difference Between List Building and Email Marketing

Some people think that list building and email marketing are the same thing...but they are not! In this article, I'll quickly go over the differences.

I tend to discuss them as if they're interchangeable. That's because they go hand-in-hand, but soon, you'll learn what the differences are.

The beauty of list building and email marketing is that you'll be able to multiply your profits easily, compared to just promoting a landing page that's linking out to offers that you're promoting.

What is List Building?

In direct response marketing, you'll want to communicate the right message to the right market.

Before you can do that, you'll have to develop that targeted audience that can potentially buy from you.

That audience list, is your "list."

When I was starting out, I would create a prospect list. If I wanted to sell websites, I would look for potential business owners that would possibly buy a website from me.

That list was paper-based. Any kind of list, digital or not, is your contact list...aka your contact database.

Later on, I eventually used databases like Microsoft Access, niche-specific databases, and then eventually server-based databases like MySQL, MS SQL, and Oracle DB. These databases stored tables of contact data (my list).

Without getting too technical, I typically build a list that contains an email address at the very least. That's for digital marketing .

For offline marketing, I'll have a first name, last name, and mailing address. Sometimes, even a phone number if I'm planning to make calls.

The whole idea here to build a super qualified list. You'll have to figure out the right balance between quality vs quantity.

Since you have a contact database, you'll be able to take advantage of remarketing to your list and multiply your profits.

What is Email Marketing?

Now that you've built a list, now, you have to start building your revenue.

The way you do that is to promote relevant offers to that list.

Besides just blasting out an email and making your list aware of what you're offering, there are other steps to make a list subscriber a customer. That's part of the lead-to-customer conversion process.

One of the processes that will boost conversions is building the know-like-and trust factor.

As you can imagine, there are many ways to go about doing that.

For example, if I built a list of people that consisted of my classmates at golfing school, and I wanted to promote discounted golf equipment, then the "know and like" part of the equation is already taken care of.

However, imagine if I wanted to sell office chairs to them. First of all, the audience isn't targeted. Even if they knew me and liked me, it would be a harder sale.

If you'd like to learn more about building your list and making money from it, take a peak at the Secret Email System.