The Importance Of An Email List For Your Online Business And How
To Create One
For any business whether offline or online you need customers.
It's much easier to get potential customers into your online
store, or business website, by a number of different means,
search engine traffic, adverts of many kinds, or from links on
other sites. It doesn't matter how they got there in the first
place, as long as they buy, you can capture some details then
and send them updates on your later offers or deals. But what
about if these visitors don't buy, how do you bring them back
again if you offer a better deal in the future, or have new
products they may be interested in?
That's where an email list becomes your best friend, and online
businesses biggest asset. You need to capture those email
addresses before the visitor leaves. This is so important that
the big name online marketers make building a subscriber list
one of their main activities. Some of the figures bandied about
concerning email lists may be erroneous, but from my own
personal experience, they're not too far out, so I will repeat
them here.
Figures quoted for the value of each subscriber range from 50
cents to 1 dollar per subscriber per month, so the larger the
subscriber list you have the more you can make each month, you
do the maths for yourself. There is a caveat to this, your
subscriber list needs to be targeted, ie it's no use trying to
sell high heeled shoes to a predominately male audience, or
sending your best ad for gardening tools to people who sign up
on a site about rap music, if they have little interest you
won't make anything. It's also claimed that sales increase after
the potential customer has received several emails from an
online business, and the extra sales are in the order of over
50% of customers purchase when they are more comfortable with
the seller following receipt of the emails.
So now we know the value of having an email list, how do we
start to build our own subscriber base?
The easiest method is to use an online "autoresponder" such as
getresponse.com which you can preload with messages ready to
send to anyone who signs up. Then you will need a way for your
website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or sales letter
series, all good autoresponders will give you some html code
ready to paste into your webpages into which visitors can place
their name and email address as a minimum, and some will allow
you to include boxes for more information should you require it.
You now need to post this code into a visible spot in your
webpage(s) and make it as easy as possible for your visitor to
sign up for your email subscriber list. Now you have a way to
capture contact details to give you a second chance at making a
sale even after your visitor has left your site. So that's it
sit and wait for those subscribers to sign up.
Hold on a minute, why would they want to sign up for your
newsletter, or email series?
You need to give the visitor a good reason to subscribe to your
list, after all they probably already get enough emails from
spam, friends sending them the latest joke, and other online
businesses who have their address, so you need to sweeten the
deal in their favour. One of the easiest ways to attract
subscribers is to offer a free gift for subscribing. The gift
can be as simple as making the emails a course to teach them
something about the topic of your website, a free ebook (there
are plenty available on a variety of subjects if you don't have
one to give away already, search in your favourite search
engine) or you could offer a competition where subscribers can
win one of your products. Whatever you do, try to make it an
offer the visitor will find it hard to turn down,and they will
subscribe to get it.
So these are the reasons to start your own subscriber list, and
an overview of how to start getting subscribers, but what sort
of emails should you send as your list grows?
Obviously if you are just selling something, and want to remind
visitors why they went to your site in the first place, then
send them some information about your product(s) in a series of
emails, and include a reminder of the original link so they can
go back to review the salespage and hopefully buy. There is a
more subtle way though. Information is why most people are
looking on the internet, so it makes sense to make your emails
informational, and gently bring your sales pitch to the
subscribers as part of the information. If you don't have time
to write your own informational articles, you can search in
article directories for ones written on the topic your site and
newsletter deal with, just follow the directories terms for
using the articles. These articles can then be preloaded into
your autoresponder along with your additional promotional text,
ready to be sent. Once it is setup, it can be all left to run
automatically.
Hopefully you will now see the benefits of using email
newsletters to increase your online business, or website visits,
and see that it's not too difficult to get started. An article
of this type can only give you an overview of the basics of
email subscriber lists for online businesses, but there is
plenty more available online, and I'd recommend you to find out
more about it, especially how to avoid spam complaints. But most
importantly, start your own email subscriber list today, and
watch your business grow.