Affiliate Summit – Killer email and social list building techniques

I was a few minutes late into the session and it was pretty packed out, so am expecting good things. When I entered the speaker (Hunter Boyle was going over a case study. Hope that the session develops into more than this as I am nit s big fan of just having case studies at conferences..

Case study – social media examiner

Top 5 tactics
Use a light box for a sign up form, in this CSS the forum gets 70% of optins
Bonus incentive lifts response
Confirmed double opt in boosts quality (engagement level)
Social proof (testimonials) reduces anxiety
Social media makes sharing easy

Results

Year on year growth of 234%
currently at 125k email assesses
Site averages 450k visitors per month

Next up tips for landing pages..

Use before landing page (opt in page)
Use after landing page (thank you page)

Case study – Social Triggers

Top 3 tactics:
- Use multiple forums, ie sign up form at top of page, in side bar, at bottom of content and at very bottom of page.
- varied copy and call to action, ie join, sign up, instant access, all on the same page via
- used social proof on landing pages

Results

- April – september last year, tripled list to 10k sign ups
- considered the biggest driver of sign ups having the different forms, and the done that worked the best was at the end of the blog content.

Onto after landing pages…

3 key tactics
- Deliver on signup expectations and offers
- Offer a follow up form on confirmation page (to ask further details and better segment your list)
- Test social media and email sharing – share this with your emal contacts, share via facebook, share via linked in, etc
- never leave your subscribers at a dead end.. Just having a thank you page isn’t going to do much..

Auto responders

Great way to cultivate longer relationships
Series can be as short or long as needed
Engagement analytics will guide you

Lastly.. social media

Incentivise sign ups on facebook
Customise the pages
Use sign up forms to gather email addresses via contests
Test different relevant types of incentives
Create autoreponders JUST for social lists

And the session ends. A little disappointed, didn’t really think there were any killer ideas, so the topic was a little deceiving and the bit about social media was pretty non existent. Seemed a little sales focused from aweber and the case studies were all from pretty small publishers/Advertisers. Perhaps get Doug Scott to do this talk next year!!

Time now to walk round the expo hall for a bit..