When creating a brand online, it can be difficult to tell where you need to spend more or less of your time, money, and effort. E-commerce marketing guru Naresh Vissa provides his One Big Tip to help entrepreneurs tell the difference between assets that build the business and vanity metrics that could easily slip through your fingers.
Your Email List is Your Asset
Most people who run a website intended to sell things to people have a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) that they track in order to measure the success of their operations. For many, these digital KPIs include website visitors, bounce rates, organic traffic, dwell time, and so on. But Naresh points out that those metrics are never really yours. “You can't own unique visitors,” he explains, “you can't own clicks, you can't own those numbers. They can disappear with the strike of a server.”
So if all these things are transient, what should you focus on? Naresh draws our attention to having assets in your marketing strategy. And the number one asset is your contacts. “The email list is the most important asset a business person can build.” This is because you have this list no matter what. No one can take it from you.
Contrast this to a Facebook following. Naresh recounts how his friends have fared focusing on a following: “I have friends who had Facebook pages with 100,000 plus people. And because Facebook didn't like what that admin was posting, they shut down their page and boom, all the hundred thousand were gone.”
If they had 100,000 contacts on their email list, however, they would have that as long as they backed it up. That list would represent an extremely valuable asset to their business, one that no other company could take from them.
Building a List: Add Value
So if an email list is so important, how can someone build one effectively? “The easiest thing I would say,” Naresh says, “is you want to offer something of value.” If your list is valuable to you, then you need to offer your audience something valuable in return. People don’t want to give up their email address to you for free, so you need to make sure your offer is enticing.
Unfortunately, just offering a subscription to a newsletter probably isn’t going to cut it. “Think about [offering] like a free coupon, or a discount, or a free book,” Naresh says, “Giving away something of value is always way more enticing than just saying subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest news and updates.”
If you’d like to get a free copy of Naresh’s best-selling book, “50 Shades of Marketing”, just head over to his website at nareshvissa.com. You can also learn more about his marketing agency, Krish Media & Marketing by visiting their website.
