There’s a simple truth about running an e-tail business: If your site isn’t collecting opt-in e-mail addresses from your visitors, you’re losing customers, which means you’re losing sales! It’s surprising how many of these businesses don’t collect e-mail addresses from their visitors, which is an essential marketing strategy!
Since you work so hard to get visitors to your website, it is smart marketing to capture their name, e-mail address and interests when ever possible. When you include an “Opt-in” e-mail database on your website you can easily collect this critical information. Visitors can be solicited to enter their name and e-mail address to receive promotional information. Those who are interested can enter their own name into the database which gives you permission to e-mail information to them without it being considered SPAM (unwanted junk e-mail). This is a powerful method to drive business through your website.
Adding this functionality to your website needn’t be complicated. In fact, many webhosting companies such as Sirius International offer this feature as a standard part of your toolkit. Getting set up is quick and easy on most of these hosting companies servers. You don’t have to be a programmer to do it, and your opt-in list can quickly become your most valuable tool for generating future sales. It really looks professional when you allow visitors to fill in information right to your page rather than using the passé “mailto:” command.
Once you implement the marketing strategy to collect opt-in e-mail addresses, the process of managing them becomes the next task. It can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re doing. The best way to approach the job of managing your lists is to learn from someone who’s been designing and using the technique successfully for a while. Getting started is much easier than you might think, and once it’s up and running, the process of collecting opt-ins will become automatic.
Here are a few simple tips and techniques to keep your opt-in list under control. These techniques can easily be applied to any business, so even if you’re already collecting e-mail addresses, I think you’ll find the following discussion highly valuable.
The first thing you need to do is put a form on your site so you can collect e-mail addresses from your visitors. The form simply provides a place for your visitors to enter their name, e-mail address and any other information you want. The form contains a script that will automatically send you an e-mail every time someone enters their information and submits to your list, telling you their name, e-mail address and any other information you requested.
The form contains a number of fields that accept input from the keyboard. There are methods to Common Gateway Interfaces, databases, or other data collection devises from within your form. You can easily design a simple form using any HTML editing program, like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or the more advanced Homesite and others. If you need an online resource to help you understand the process, visit HTMLGoodies. Of course, if you don’t feel like creating the form yourself, a web designer will be able to assist you.
Once you’ve started collecting opt-in email addresses, there are a few things you’ll need to know to effectively manage them and guarantee the highest possible response from any mailing you send. Decide early in your planning process how you want to store, manage and use this information. For purposes of this discussion we will presume the lowest common denominator, and that is that you’ll receive each new registration notification via your e-mail. Many people simply copy the information from the e-mail and create lists in a spreadsheet or text file, which can work well. There are also some great programs available to help you manage this information easily, and some web hosts also include this capability with their online toolset.
Here are three primary strategies to help you decide your approach to managing your opt-in mail lists and help you get time effective in short order.
1. Store and mange your subscriber data correctly.As your list grows, it will become more important to ensure that you’re storing your subscriber data in a format that’s simple and convenient. The biggest problem that people run into when they start trying to manage their opt-in lists is that they quickly find themselves with lots of small lists instead of one big one. List “A” might contain people who’ve bought five or more of your, List “B” might contain people who’ve not made a purchase within the past 90 days, while List “C” might contain people who’ve downloaded free material but haven’t made a purchase.
While this means that you’re able to easily identify target segments of your customer base, it also means you can continuously spend hours preparing your various lists for each promotion you are preparing. And you always have to be conscious of what the subscriber opted-in for, and that they don’t get misplaced in the wrong promotion list.
Luckily, there are some pretty powerful products out there designed to help e-mail marketers develop, manage and segment their lists easily, from one user-friendly interface. The right software can literally save you hundreds of hours of frustration. We’re going to be talking about some of these products in future features.
2. Be diligent about opt-ins and unsubscribes.One of the most important things you can do to keep your reputation as a valued resource is make sure you manage adding subscribers in a timely manner, and perhaps even more critical, and making absolutely every “unsubscribe” request is handled with due diligence.
Requests to unsubscribe from your list should always be taken very seriously. If someone asks to be removed from your list and you continue to send them e-mail, your messages are clearly at that point spam, and nothing will get you in hot water faster than a few spam complaints. You’ll find yourself wasting hours of time explaining yourself to the “spam police,” and your hosting company or internet service provider might even terminate your account!
Of course, it’s just as important to ensure that the people who ask to be added to your list are added immediately. If you aren’t ensuring that your mailing is being delivered to each and every person who signed up, and that it arrives in a readable format, you’re literally throwing money away. For more on the formatting of marketing e-mails see E-Mail Marketing Techniques.
3. Keep Your List Clean.Keeping your list clean means more than just removing unsubscribes. It also means sifting through the messages that “bounce back” to you after a mailing as “undeliverable.” Now you have to decide which ones should be removed from your list altogether and which ones you might want to try mailing again. If there’s no obvious problem with the subscriber’s e-mail address, then this usually means they entered it incorrectly when they opted-in to your list or that it’s no longer in use, and the address will have no future use to you.
By the way, are you subscribed to your competitors’ mailing lists? You should be! A big part of keeping tabs on your competitors is monitoring what products or services they’re actively promoting and how much they are selling them for. If your competitors are smart, I can just about guarantee that they’re subscribed to your mailing list, too.
