Email List

You’ve probably heard it said, and it is very true, that it is cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. But have you considered how that saying still holds water when you’re talking about traffic to your site? Once you get someone to visit your site, the expensive part of the transaction is over. But what is next? Once they’ve visited, how do you keep your visitors coming back? Once they’ve made a purchase, how do you keep them as regular customers? This chapter will share a few tips on how to keep the traffic you already have by building an email list.

If you want your visitors to come back, take a minute to consider why they came to you in the first place. Was it for your great content? Was it for technical help or some other service? Was it to get something for free? Whatever reason brought your visitor the first time could be the key to getting that all-important repeat visit. But how will your visitors know they can return and get more of what they want? You’re going to capture their email addresses so you can tell them so, and you’re going to tell them over and over again.

Maintaining an email list of previous site visitors and customers is an integral part of building your online business. Through your email list you can keep these clients informed about new and exciting offers, information, and freebies you’ve placed on your web site since their last visit. Your email list will be the tool you use to keep your site in the forefront of your clients’ minds

There are two basic types of tools internet marketers use to manage an email list, an autoresponder or a broadcast script. An autoresponder is just like the name sounds, it automatically sends responses to someone who has subscribed. You can have these responses timed to just about any interval and you can set them up in advance to send out messages for days, weeks, months or years to come.

A broadcast script is used to send out emails to your list as you write them; you could use this to send out announcements on a sporadic basis, or you could publish a regular newsletter. Some online autoresponse scripts allow you to perform a combination of these tasks, sending out regular pre-written emails through the autoresponder and adding occasional broadcasts whenever you want.

Hotscripts.com (http://www.hotscripts.com) is a good source if you are looking for PHP or ASP based e-mail list scripts

Most internet marketing gurus recommend using a hosted service like a hosted solution with it’s own mail servers, then you’ll consider using Aweber (http://www.aweber.com) or GetResponse (http://www.getresponse.com) because these services have an excellent track record of actually delivering emails. With the proliferation of spam filters, it can be difficult to get emails through, even to those who actually want to hear from you.

A free option would be to send out broadcast emails by starting a private Yahoo Group (http://groups.yahoo.com) or Google Group (http://groups.google.com).

Email List