Zero Sum List Building Experiment

I’m sure a lot of you are aware of my  background and how this has lead me to adopt a more strategic and analytical view to IM than most marketers. I guess it’s just the way I am – I have to look at the numbers, examine the results to see if any improvements can be made, and then re-test over and over until I hit the Sweet Spot.

Well, I think I’ve just about done it…with regard to hitting my List Building Sweet Spot.

You see over the course of the past month or so I have been working away, trying to devise the ultimate List Building Strategy. Since I first came online I’ve been really focused on building a list, and must have tried every approach known to man.

I have more magic button list building WSOs on my hard drive than I’d like to admit. Whilst many of them do work there is always a trade-off which the seller usually forgets to mention in their epic sales thread….it Costs to build a list – a lot!

You can either invest your Time in building a list (which can be slow and take forever to see real results) or you can invest your Money (which will see you reach your goals a lot faster but of course will you cost you Big!)… I have neither the Time nor the Money needed to build a substantial list so I began exploring other methods.

There is a term in economics called a “Zero Sum Game” whereby the total gains made by a participant are equal to the total losses made. I was interested in exploring this concept in regards to my list building endeavors and I’m glad to announce I seem to have found a method which works.

List Building Sweet Spot

Basically what I have been doing is investing in a form of paid advertising which drives leads to my squeeze page. A percentage of these sign-up to my mailing list and receive the free gift which was on offer.

Now in order for this to be a Zero Cost Investment I needed to be able to immediately monetize enough of these subscribers after sign-up to offset the cost of the advertising. I’m not talking about mailing these subs offer-after-offer in the hope of making enough affiliate commissions to cover the cost, I’m talking about constructing a well converting sales funnel that would instantly return my investment.

The first time I tried this I made back most of my money, the second time I got a little closer…but the third time my funnel was converting nicely at it’s Sweet Spot and I covered 100% the cost of the traffic.

“Awesome!….” I thought to myself, now all I have to do is Rinse & Repeat and I will be able to build as big a mailing list as I want for FREE!

You see after sign-up my subs were directed to the download page for their Free Gift. I took this opportunity to present them with a fantastic OTO. This is the point where I began to regain my investment as a percentage of my subs took me up on the great offer and purchased the OTO.

In doing so I was able separate my list in two – automatically transferring anyone who purchased the OTO onto a different list. This gave me the added bonus of building a buyers list. This was super easy to do as I was able to integrate my auto-responder code into the payment processor and then set up an automation rule in Get Response.

So what kind of results have I been seeing with this?
On average I have been adding 40-50 double opt-ins to my list each day I used this method, with 5-10 residual sign-ups in the days after I purchased the advertising.

To some 50 opt-ins per day may not be too exciting but remember this… They cost me nothing! I’m able to add 50 subscribers to my list each and ever day for a Zero Net Cost.

Now remember when building an email list their are 2 Metrics which you must keep an eye on:

CPS : this is the Cost per Subscriber, how much is it costing you to add each new subscriber to your list?
LTV : this is the Long Term Value of each subscriber and is usually denoted by a monthly revenue amount ($ per month).

To operate profitably you must keep your CPS as low and your LTV as high as possible. Perhaps your CPS was $1 per sub and your LTV was $2 per sub per month – you can now say that after one month your profit per subscriber would be $1 (LTV – CPS) and $2 for every subsequent month they stay on your list.

Think about how much more profitable your business would be if you could completely eradicate the CPS i.e. have a CPS = zero. That’s what my goal was when I started experimenting with this method.

I was reading a thread over a the Warrior Forum a few days ago where one of the members was real excited because he added 82 subscribers to his list in a couple of days. I thought this was really great for him but when I looked more closely at his post the numbers weren’t so good…

This was because he spent $130 on traffic which gave him these 82 subscribers. Therefore :

CPS = 130/82 = $1.59 Cost per Subscriber

Hmmm…. on second glance his haul of 82 subscribers doesn’t look that attractive does it? You see for most of us this sort of model isn’t viable in the medium term let alone as a long term strategy for building your business.

You must look at the numbers, they simply don’t lie and will very quickly give you an honest appraisal of how you are doing.

Now I didn’t write this post to relay how great I am or anything…I just wanted to highlight how with a little lateral thinking, looking at the numbers, and a bit of tweaking how anyone can build a mailing list quite fast…for basically no cost to you! The Zero Sum Game at play here allows the cost of the traffic to be immediately offset by the revenue generated by the OTO in your sales funnel.

I hope my little success that I have outlined above will help spur you all on and underline the importance of taking a step back and review your results as you progress. While sometimes things look great at first glance it’s worthwhile to analyze what the numbers are saying because they may put a different slant on the story.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the post! I was thinking of putting down my Zero Cost List Building methods in a Report for you guys – do you think that this would be a good idea?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. If there is enough interest I’ll get to work and explain to you how you can replicate and even exceed my results 🙂

Cheers,

Noel.

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