SETTING UP YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Without an email address, you’ve got no means of communicating with your visitors [and hopefully buyers] and they’ve got no means of communicating with you. Advertising and search engine optimization will get your site listed, and noticed, but you need a follow up strategy to maximize your marketing. Not every visitor to your site will buy. In fact, if you have a conversion rate of 10% of visitors to buyers, you’re doing very well. So you need a follow up strategy, partly to get those visitors to return and buy, and partly to encourage visitors to your website in the first place.

Every successful internet marketer will tell you that you need lists to optimize your marketing strategy, but more of this later.

An email address allows you to contact anybody and everybody you think might improve your sales, and as already discussed in the chapter on affiliate links, you might want to offer your visitors your own affiliate program, so they buy your product, and for everybody they send to your website to buy, you offer them a commission.

But here’s an important tip:

Try and get your primary address as part of your domain name

For example, if your website URL is www.potatosaladstodiefor.com, then get your primary email address as spud@potatosaladstodiefor.com Other email addresses will have a different user name, but your website must feature in each and every one, to give you maximum exposure.

Your domain ‘host’ should offer you an email address, or several if you want, as part of the hosting package.

This type of email address is also more professional than those using the email services of the major providers such as yahoo, or hotmail, or aol. Imagine your ‘targets’ receiving an email from spud@yahoo.com It looks tacky, tells them nothing about your website, and you lose a great opportunity to promote your site. If I’m into potato salad in a big way, and I receive an email from spud@potatosaladtodiefor.com, I’m going to visit. But an email from spud@yahoo.com will be deleted.

There’s a massive e-commerce business out there on the Net, dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling them on, or using them for bulk email shots to customers willing to pay the price, on a sliding upward scale according to the numbers you buy. So an email ‘shot’ to one million will cost you more than a shot to one thousand.

I have the gravest reservations about these bulk email shot providers, for two reasons:

Firstly, there are no reliable statistics of their success rate, known as Return on Investment [ROI]. In other words, out of the one million ‘shot’ mailings, how many will actually convert into sales.

Secondly, Internet Service Providers [ISP] are being much more rigorously monitored and regulated than a few years ago, to try and reduce spam emailing, which is washing over the Net like a tidal wave. In extreme case, some sites are being closed down, and in theory at least, you should neither receive nor send spam emails.

But there’s a very fine line between ‘solicited’ and ‘unsolicited’ emails, and it’s all down to ‘opt in’ lists. They work like this:

If you’re browsing on the Net, and you casually log onto www.potatosaladstodiefor.com, and then log off, your visit can be recorded and your email address ‘captured’. The ‘captor’ then assumes, rightly or wrongly, that you’re interested in potato salad, and anything else remotely related to potato salad, like mixed leaf salad, pasta salad, pastas, pizzas, fast food, you name it, the list is endless, so you’re treated as an ‘opt in’ name. Before you know it, you’re getting emails from all these websites, advertising their products and inviting you to visit.