How to Start a Business on the Internet: Lesson 9
Building a mailing list of people who are interested in your site, products and services is a best practice you want to embrace. There's no doubt that every visitor to your site will not buy. You want a way to capture visitor name and email address so you can keep in touch.
Email List Building
One of the best practices for any successful web business
is maintaining contact with visitors. The way to do this is to add a form to your site for people to opt-in to your email maiing list. You can then email notices, more information about your products and special offer. Eventually, subscribers may purchase, which is what you want. In order to maintain contact, you must be able to reach out. You can't email your list using your regular email client such as Outlook, Mail or Entourage. You will get penalized or worse, banned which means you get kicked off the server and lose your website and even your connection to the Internet. There's an easy way to overcome this problem.
Permission Marketing
You have heard that sending unsolicited advertisements through email is spam, and that is a really bad idea. Even sending a mass mailing to people you know or think you know can result is catastrophy. Permission marketing is the solution. It is email marketing that sends email after the recipient gives their consent. It's called opt-in and you basically ask them to join a free periodic mailing list.
Building Your Permission Marketing List
How do you go about building a list? Your first and best source for subscribers is your own website. You need to create a newsletter that you send out via email periodically. It can be monthly, weekly, or even daily. The condition is that you clearly disclose how often it will be sent. Your mail can be lengthy, or short. It can offer information, jokes, recipes, tips or anything. The better the content of yourmail, the more successful it will be. At least, you could simply do a monthly email with special offers or deals. Once you have decided on the format and frequency, you need to promote it.
You promote it on the most obvious place, your own website. Dedicate some space on the front page (and other important pages on your site if possible) of your site to promoting your newsletter. Describe what it is, how often it goes out, what kind of information it contains, and a link to your privacy policy. Include a field where the visitor can enter their email address and possibly their name, and click a button to automatically have their address added to your mailing list.
When a visitor to your website subscribes to your newsletter, they have just given you their permission to advertise to them. Every time you send out a newsletter, you are of course going to include ads for your products, services, or information, and it will have links to your website throughout. Hence: Permission Marketing.
Most web business marketers add an extra enticement, such as a special report when visitors signup for their mailing list. You can also ask your web programmer to make it so when an actual buyer is checking out, they have the opportunity to check a box that will add them to your mailing list. You’ll find that about 80% of paying customers opt to subscribe to the mailing list.
Here is a great site that provides an incentive, double-opt in to the mailing list and allows you to send promotional emails to the list you build. All you do is link to the site. You get banners and buttons to add to your site to make it easy to ask visitors to join your list. Check it out here.
You might be surprised at how effective this promotional technique is. People do subscribe to mailing lists all the time, and I so strongly believe in this technique that I believe that no website can afford not to have a permission marketing plan in effect. You can significantly increase traffic to your website and that means increasing sales! |
