This document discusses the "Seven Deadly Sins" of list building: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. It provides examples of how exhibiting each sin can negatively impact a mailing list by reducing engagement, increasing unsubscribes, and harming deliverability. The document advocates practicing the corresponding virtues of patience, charity, diligence, humility, chastity, kindness, and temperance to have a healthy, growing list and nurture long-term subscribers.

1. The Seven Deadly Sins
of List Building
Phil Hollows
Founder and CEO
FeedBlitz
www.feedblitz.com
@phollows

2. About Phil Hollows
• Founder and CEO of FeedBlitz
• Author of “List Building for Bloggers”
– ListBuildingForBloggers.com
• Clients include: Seth Godin, Fred Wilson, Jay
Baer, Brian Clark, Danny Brown, Krazy Coupon
Lady, Cecily Kellogg and over 70,000 others!
• phil@feedblitz.com
• @phollows

3. Why Care About Your List?
“I get ten times more
response to my blog
from my email
subscribers
than I do from anyone
else.”
Seth Godin

4. You’re An Accidental Email Marketer!

5. The Seven Deadly Sins
• Wrath • Committing these sins
• Greed will:
• – Affect your list
Sloth
– Affect your
• Pride deliverability
• Lust – Lose you visitors
• Envy – Cost you money
• Gluttony

6. Wrath

7. Wrath
• Unsubscribes
• Sending Limits
• Deliverability Issues
• Anger make you
unavailable, unable to
listen
• It taps into core fight /
flight system

8. Virtue: Patience
• Listen to the unsubscribes
• Respect limits or change how you send
• Manage your deliverability:
– Authentication: SPF, Sender ID, DKIM
– IP and domain reputation
– Tracking: SenderScore.org
• Action: Dual opt-in, best practices

9. Greed

10. Greed
• Take, Take, Take
• Send, Send, Send
• “20% off, free shipping”
• Recipients feel
disrespected
• Do you think of your list
as a resource, database
or an asset; and not as
people or subscribers?

11. Virtue: Charity
• By all means monetize, but:
• Give, give, give!
• Educate, entertain, enlighten
• Walk the walk on trust and authority
• Timely, actionable and relevant
• Explore alternative ways to monetize

12. Sloth

13. Sloth

14. Sloth
• No list at all
• No testing
• No metrics
• Taking short cuts

15. Virtues: Diligence, Attention
• Test / Mix it up!
– Time of day
– Signup form locations
– Popups
– Incentives
– Layouts / Designs / Subject Lines
• Metrics matter
– Pay attention to the trends
– Open, bounce, unsubscribe rates

16. Pride

17. Pride
• Everything I send is
great!
• One size fits all

18. Virtue: Humility
• You are not your audience!
• Timeliness:
– Multiple delivery schedules
• Relevance:
– Topic-specific lists, activity-based mailings
• Test:
– Subject lines, calls to action, time of day
• Platform:
– How does it look on your phone?

19. Lust

20. Lust
• Excitement is good!
• Capitalize on it, but…
• Beware short cuts
• Overwhelming the
new subscriber
• Too much
“enthusiasm” gets you
into trouble!

21. Virtue: Chastity
• Reward new subscribers
• Nurture the relationship
• Build trust
• Take it easy with your autoresponders
• Use activity-based mailings
• Send the right message at the right time to
the right person

22. Envy

23. Envy
• Size isn’t everything!

24. Virtue: Kindness
• Quality counts over quantity
• Nurture your engaged subscribers
• Focus on your trends
• Build on your success
• Reward continued activity
• Prune older lists

25. Gluttony

26. Gluttony
• Aggressive popups
• Buying names
• Not using dual opt-in
• Bombarding
subscribers for traffic,
income

27. Virtue: Temperance
• Practice safe popups! Respect the visitor
• Experiment with different signup forms
• NEVER BUY LISTS
• Stay relevant
• It’s OK to mail once a week if that’s what
your readers expect

28. Thank You!
Questions? Comments?
• Talk to me!
– phil@feedblitz.com
– @phollows
– Say hi @ Booth #713
• Resources
– Check out:
ListBuildingForBloggers.com
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