In today's competitive world of internet marketing, it is
essential to be able to communicate with your prospects. Any
visitor that has found your website is probably already
interested in your product or service, so to convince them to
buy you need to get their email addresses on your newsletter.
This is a simple 2-step process.
1) Set up a form to captureyour visitors email addresses.
2) Set up a system to distribute your newsletter.
SETTING UP A FORM
If you don't you will be losing 70% of your potential customers.
You need to be able to remind them to come back to your site
and to inform them of special offers or new products or
services.
You should place your form strategically on your home page
where it will be noticed. It does not have to be large. A simple
box on the side of the page will do fine.
Something I learnt from Mark Joyner (ForeverWeb and
ROIBOT) is that if you include the word "BECAUSE" your
newsletter subscription will skyrocket. Give your visitors a
reason to subscribe. You could offer them free information,
access to a members area, or something that will be of real
value to them. You can get some ideas from our "free" page
on our website.
Remember, don't ask for too many details or you will scare
your prospects away. However you can easily ask them for
their name and email address. You should also clearly state
your privacy policy - let your visitors know that you are not
going to distribute their addresses to third parties.
If you are paying for website hosting you almost certainly have
a cgi-bin which will allow you to set up a form. Some free
website hosts however do not give you a cgi bin because of
security issues.
If cgi scripts are beyond you at the moment, you can get a free
form at Bravenet.com. With this option you don't need to know
how to upload the scripts. All you will have to do is copy and
paste some HTML code onto your webpage. Bravenet hosts
your form and sends you a notification whenever someone
submits it.
For those who don't know, a form works like this. You upload a
form script to the "cgi-bin" on your website server (where you
host your site). You then put some HTML code on your
webpage. When someone fills in the form and clicks on the
"Submit" or "Send" button, the information is sent to the "cgi
bin" on your website server. The script you have put on your
server (form handler) "handles" this information and sends you
the results of the form. It will take you a few hours to get it to
work properly, but believe me, if you are getting website traffic
and don't yet have a form, you are certainly losing sales.
A form will also allow you to redirect the visitor to a
thank-you page. Take advantage of this and make sure you
redirect them to your special offer page.
YOUR NEWSLETTER
Once your form is set up you can get it to send any email
addresses either to you or to a newsletter server. If the cgi
script sends YOU the form details you will have to manually
copy and paste the details into a mailing list.
However you can automate this by sending the details to a
newsletter server where visitors can subscribe and unsubscribe
automatically. Automation of your newsletter management will
save you time and let you concentrate on promotion and
marketing.
Threre are a number of sites on the web which will let you start
off your own mailing list such as ListBot, eGroups, and Topica.
However you will also have to display their ads on your
newsletter and sometimes there are delays in sending out your
newsletter because of the number of free users. The above
services are largely used for discussion groups so always have
heavy traffic.
However if you want more control over your newsletter, you can
get an excellent free script called MailMachine from
Mike'sWorld. This gives your mailing list a bit more class, and
you can be more certain that your newsletter is reaching your
subscribers on time. You can send your newsletters out from
the admin login via the web.
If you need an easy solution to handle your newsletter you can
go one step further and get ROIBOT newsletter server. This is
a
complete solution that can personalise your newsletter, allow
you to schedule it to go out to your mailing lists even when you
are away, and the cost is minimal. You can also have an
unlimited number of lists of any size.
You can get the HTML code needed for a form and links to the
scripts mentioned above from our website -
http://www.TheWebsEye.com/newsletters.htm
The next step is to publish your newsletter. You need to keep
track of what you have written and when you published it.
You also need to format it to between 55 or 65 characters a
line BECAUSE: a) it is easier to read short lines b)many
people set their email programs to read only 65 characters so
if you wrote your newsletter with 80 characters, the lines
would appear broken.
There is an excellent free application called eZine Assistant
that will do all this for you. Ezine assistant can be downloaded
free from our downloads gateway -
http://www.TheWebsEye.com/downloads.htm.
Now you are ready to roll. Simply cut and paste your
newsletter from your eZine Assistant or other text editor into
the online form on your website and send it out to your mailing
list.
About the Author
Richard Igoe is the owner of http://TheWebsEye.com, a
resource center providing valuable free tools for website
design, promotion and marketing.