Archive for the ‘Internet Misc’ Category
June 17th, 2010 | 
Author: Auto Responders: The Marketers Magic Trick
Imagine if John an avid poker player visits your website. You sell a book that helps him improve his poker game. He’s highly interested in what you have to offer but he’s just not ready to purchase yet. He’s still recovering from that extended holiday and needs to pay off the credit card that he maxed out playing poker online.
He sees a form on your site asking if he’d like more detailed information and so he fills in his name and email address. Within seconds an email is sent to John with a short summary of the benefits offered by your book and a couple of useful tips he can use right away.
A few days later John receives another email that goes something like this:
“Hey John I know you’re quite busy especially with the holiday period coming to an end but I just wanted to get in touch with you to let you know we’ve got a special coming up for that ‘How to win at poker’ handbook you’ve always wanted.
John’s forgotten that he’d been looking to buy a book like this and this email reminds him that he needs to improve his game. John adds buying the handbook to his “To Do” list and goes about his daily business.
Another few days later John receives another email; again reminding him that the special is about to end alongside another juicy tip that’s in the book. John realizes he doesn’t have much time now and goes off to purchase your “How to win at poker” handbook.
Every email sent to John was automated. You didn’t have to wait for him to subscribe you didn’t have to personally address John nor did you have to send him an email every few days.
The example above shows how a series of auto responder emails can be used as a powerful “hands off” marketing tool for your web site.
Now take a few minutes and think to yourself “How can I use auto responders on my web site?”
No seriously. Stop and think. This simple exercise could easily add another stream of revenue to your web site that you didn’t know existed.
Auto responders can work for ANY business. You don’t need to be selling something online for them to work. For example let’s pretend you have a hair styling business. You cater towards young men looking for a modern attractive hair style. Part of your service includes helping them select a hair style that greatly enhances their facial features and gets them the compliments they’re after from the ladies.
On your website you setup a simple form something like: “Guys get the hair style that’ll get you noticed. Free email report shows you how.
Once John’s filled in the form he gets an email with a summary of tips about the type of hair style suited for men with different features. It also mentions that you’re an expert in this field and your salon regularly helps men go from dud to stud in less than an hour.
A few days later John receives yet another tip this time on how washing his hair with a different shampoo can lead to different results. John starts to see how much of an expert you are but also how much he’d rather just pay someone to take care of all this for him. He hasn’t got much time now since he’s started killing those poker sites. And so off he goes to call and make an appointment at your salon.
The content in your auto responders need to be useful. Whilst including marketing hype purely about your product and services can work if there is a strong interest you’ll usually need to provide relevant tips and information to keep your subscriber engaged and ready to pull out their wallet when need be.
You should opt to use autoresponder software that offers personalization which includes the ability to address John by his first name as that greatly increases response rates.
Finally you should TEST your auto responders. Make sure they aren’t trapped by spam filters make sure the subscribers are receiving the auto responders in the order they’re meant to be and so forth.
Armed with this new knowledge you should be able to add an additional stream of revenue that could do some serious boosting to your profits. Some online businesses use this single marketing strategy as the sole way of getting new clients. They do this because it works!
Now have you decided how you’re going to use auto responders for your business?
About the writer: This article is written by Eddie Machaalani cofounder of Interspire. Interspire is a leading provider of ecommerce shopping cart software content management software email autoresponder software and other web software solutions.
Power Up Your Opt-in Marketing
To succeed in online marketing you will need to succeed in effective communications with visitors and potential customers. This is vital to capturing and increasing your traffic sales and eventually your bottom line. Communications must remain ethically right too while completing the equation of communication success.
There are indeed many ways that can help make light work of the communication process. One such way is via optin marketing which is both effective and ethical in approach. Listed below are ways by which you can use to help power up your optin marketing campaign.
1 Capture and build your list
This is the very first thing you will need to do; to kick start your optin marketing campaign. Without customers it is just impossible to carry on doing your marketing online. Capture customers’ information especially their first names and email addresses and compile them into a database listing with which you will further continue your optin marketing campaign.
2 Create an effective optin registration box
It is just a simple registration box by which those who wish to know more about your offer will type in their first names and email addresses. However this optin box can bring fantastic results if it is properly constructed. It must achieve the ultimate aim of influencing the minds of prospects and getting them to disclose their information.
3 No need for any kind of fear
Optin marketing is similar to consensual marketing. That is to say prospects have given you the right to use their information that they have disclosed through your optin box. You will need not fear the ever damaging threat of being labeled a spammer. There is no harm in giving away some free gift such as a free newsletter for their opting in. This is one effective way to power up your optin marketing campaign.
4 Strategic use of the optin box
Use the optin box strategically. The main purpose is to get information of as many qualified prospects as possible. Details of information to get include First Name Primary Email Address Subscribe button and your Privacy Policy. As far as privacy policy is concerned this is important to your campaign as it gives the subscriber the feeling of security and complete privacy and nondisclosure for their information given via your optin box.
5 Give power to the title of your offer
Optin marketing is more effective when you give your optin offer a powerful compelling title that will best describe the special features and the ways specific needs of the prospect can be met. This is essential to positively influence the decision to subscribe at that point in time.
6 Ease of use and accessibility
The optin box should be easily located and visitors should find it easy to use; there should not be too many information to be filled in. It should be part of your website as visitors can easily find it. Be aware that visitors do not like to hunt for the registration box at all. This is another effective way to power up your optin marketing.
7 Perform regular mailout
In optin marketing once you have built the customer listing you must prepare email messages related to the offer and mail them out to your subscribers by means of autoresponders. Your campaign will see better results as each time you reinforce the special benefits that your offer can bring to the subscribers in subsequent emails. It is a proven strategy simply because subscribers may have forgotten these benefits that they can get from your product.
8 Build a relationship
In any form of marketing relationships are important. For optin marketing it is no different. As the customer list grows you must ensure to build trust and good relationship with your subscribers. Stay close and connected with them. Each one of them is precious and is an asset to your business. This is perhaps the most important way to power up your optin marketing campaign.
Optin marketing believes that once you have built the list and started to grow your relationship with your subscribers the chances of success are very high as you would have by then secured their trust and confidence in you and your product.
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So You Want To Pick An Email Provider?
There are so many email providers out there that it can be difficult to figure out which one will best suit your needs. Here are some of the major factors to consider.
1 Usage: This is generally divided into commercial and noncommercial usage. If youre simply looking for a personal email address then you wont need to shell out a dime. You can of course pay for upgraded plans if you so desire.
Businesses should ideally have an email address that reflects either the business or domain name. These commercial accounts are usually more secure and featuredriven than personal email accounts. However the choice is ultimately yours.
2 Availability: Pick a nameany name. Now try to sign up for a Hotmail or Yahoo email account with that name. Chances are if you can think it its been taken. You have a higher probability of getting a short easy to remember email address from a smaller lesser known email provider. If you really want to open an email account with one of the larger providers your best bet is a combination of letters and numbers.
3 Space: I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m constantly in contact with freelancing services and clients. I write fiction and always get feedback from readers. I also volunteer as a beta reader so I regularly receive new chapters from authors. I can never seem to find the time to delete all the old emails so they keep piling up. Why am I telling you this? Because I’m using a whopping 2 of my 1GB limit.
In the land of email accounts size does not necessarily matter. Unless you plan on using the same email address for the rest of your life while never deleting a message or youre actually certain that you will have use for the space dont limit yourself to a huge inbox. That doesnt mean you shouldnt sign up if you want to but youll probably be fine with an inbox between say 100MB and 250 MB.
4 Security Tools: There are a lot of bad things out there and most of them find their way into your email. I’m not even going to tell whats been popping up in my junk mail recently. If youre considering an email provider that doesnt supply the following we have one word for youdont.
Antivirus: No selfrespecting email account should be without this. If you know that youre going to be downloading anything at all from your emails look for an email provider that offers scans using some of the more reliable programs such as Norton or McAfee please note that this is not a substitute for having your own antivirus installed.
Antispam: Users of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are well acquainted with errant spam creeping into their inbox from time to time. Sigh…antispam software rarely seems to be 100 effective but some protection is better than none.
If you have an absolute zero tolerance for spam you might want to consider paying for a service such as that offered by Bluebottle. In this sender verification system only emails from senders who are on youre allowed list make it to your inbox. Anyone else receives a confirmation message that must be clicked on before the email is allowed. This eliminates the possibility of automated spam getting in.
5 Filters: Yes sending spam to the bulk folder is a sort of filtering but thats not quite what I’m talking about. What I mean is that you should have the ability to create folders and send relevant new emails there automatically. This saves time especially if you receive a lot of emails.
6 Attachments: It is important to remember that not all personal email accounts allow attachments. There are two things to take into consideration: both the total size and the number of files you can send through your email. Youll need to find a balance between the two. It doesnt make sense being able to send unlimited files with a size limit of 2 kb per file now does it?
So taking all these factors into consideration which email provider would I recommend?
Yahoo Mail has recently introduced some new mail domains such as ymail.com so the unavailability issue may have eased up a bit. Still there is the question of spam. Nevertheless it continues to be one of the strongest candidates. Another good email provider is Hush Mail. In terms of paid services Bluebottle wins hands down…so far. All email providers have their advantages and disadvantages so I’ll leave it up to you to choose the one that’s perfect for you. I hope that this information has been useful to you.
About the writer: R.D.Wylder is the founder and owner of RDWConcepts. She has been working as a freelance writer for the past two years and has produced pieces on a wide range of topics.
