One of the best ways to increase your email marketing list is to offer a completely free course that both teaches your target customer base something they need to know and sells your product or service at the same time.

This works well in building both your customer base and loyalty to your company as people will sign up, giving you their email address, and make you more recognisable through a regular delivery of emails to their inbox.

Here’s how you can create your own client attraction mini course to help you build your base and increase your conversion rate:

In order to create your email mini-course, you’ll need to either purchase an email marketing system that has autoresponder capability, which is the ability to pre-set emails to go out at a periodic interval when someone opts into a list, or employ the services of an email marketing company to handle that for you.

Determine your theme and create an attention-grabbing name. Think about what you want to teach your prospects – you’ll want to focus on solving a problem or providing unique information to the person signing up for your mini course.

You can now focus on creating your content. Your email mini course should consist of eight to twelve emails to be delivered over eight to twelve days. Most of these emails need to contain valuable, actionable content that will help your prospect solve his or her problems or give them information they wouldn’t know but WANT to. Two or three of the emails, however, can focus on other services that you offer that would also help the prospect out.

Now add your call to action, which is basically what you want your new prospect to do – BUY from you. Don’t batter the reader with sales hype, instead be subtle by either included a resource box at the end of each email with a link to a webpage with your proposal and call to action or include a postscript (P.S.) that includes a link to the same page.

You can do this in the body of the email too, making a natural connection between the content of the email and the product you want them to buy.

Lastly, at the end of each email, add a teaser. “In our next lesson, we’ll talk about…” for example. This will keep the reader engaged and awaiting the next email.

You’ll obviously need to design an opt-in box to appear on your website – the homepage if possible – so people can sign up to your mini course. This should at least capture the first name, last name and email address of the person signing up. If you feel you need more information, such as a phone number, you can include that too, but bear in mind conversion rates are better the less information you ask for.

If you have employed an email marketing company they will be able to advise you on this.

If you are going to send your mini course sign ups other emails, such as a weekly newsletter, be sure to tell them this as they sign up. No-one likes unwanted, unrequested emails. Also give them the option to unsubscribe.

Now you’re all set up you’re going to need to know how your mini course is performing. Your email marketing software or company will be able to tell you:

Number of sign ups per day / week / month
Open rates from the email
Clickthrough rates
Unsubscribe rates

Use this information to tweak your email marketing until you are getting the best out of it.

Once you’ve got your course working well, you should begin to see an increase in conversion from casual reader to paying customer!

Author Bio: Trevor Richards is writing on behalf of Extravision, providers of email marketing services.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: email marketing, email mini course, email marketing lists