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Reverse The Order Of Events To Get More People To Join Your Mailing List

Guest post by: David Hurley

Article Overview: List building can be a tricky business. Not everybody is eager to give up their email address when they visit a website even when faced with an enticing offer of a free e-book. One way around this may be to reverse the order in which you present the opt-in and download procedure...

Reverse The Order Of Events To Get More People To Join Your Mailing List

One marketing tool that should be in every Web marketer's toolbox is a professional quality autoresponder. With an autoresponder Internet sellers can maintain contact with their list of subscribers and build a relationship with them. At its best it is a process that Seth Godin calls "turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers."

Some marketers prefer only to send out topical broadcasts while others prefer to set up an automated process with dozens of pre-written and pre-loaded letters that are delivered to each subscriber according to a pre-determined schedule, effectively automating the process of contacting clients. An automated process will save you time, but letters go stale so if you really want to cultivate your list of subscribers you will need to prune and update your letters and also send out some topical broadcasts from time to time.

But for autoresponder marketing beginners a more pressing question is usually this:

==> "How on earth do you get people to agree to enroll themselves on your mailing list?"

The most common way is to post an opt in form on your website for your visitors to fill in. Another method is to invite readers of your copy to send a blank email to your autoresponder email address.

Of course, merely embedding an opt-in form for your newsletter on your site does not mean anybody will feel induced to fill it in. So you need to offer an incentive.

The most common approach is to offer a free e-book or e-mail course which is made available to subscribers after they have filled in the opt in form. The trick with this way is to make sure that the ebook contains content that related to the concerns of your target market and is unique and compelling. If you are offering a similar bunch of free e-books as all the other internet marketers in your niche then you should not be surprised if your list is not growing as quickly as you would like it to even if your website receives a lot of traffic.

Evan with a solid incentive in place, a number of people will still be unwilling to give up their e-mail address even if they are interested in your offer. For some of those people there is going to be a psychological barrier, or a level of resistance that marketers need to respond to.

When it comes to a reluctance to fill in opt in forms, one technique is to put back the moment when you request the name and e-mail of the subscriber to a point when there is usually a lot more emotional commitment to the process of accessing the product. So, rather than requiring that the would-be subscriber fill in an opt in form, the online marketer encourages the prospect to directly access the free e-book (or whatever) by clicking a link. There is far less resistance to clicking a link than to filling in a form!

On clicking the link the prospect is taken to the e-book download page and will be invited to supply a download keycode in order to "unlock" the e-book. Those who haven't got the password - which is practically everybody - are invited to click a link which opens a password application form where they give their e-mail address so that the code can be delivered to their inbox.

The process of obtaining a password offers the prospect a reason for giving up his or her e-mail address at an emotionally warmer point in the interaction between prospect and web copy. This can be especially effective if the prospect lands on the download page via a product evaluation style letter which has effectively presold the product.

So rather than hit your website visitors with an opt in form when they are still feeling cold, give them something easy to do like click a link, warm them up and then sock it to them and see if they don't add themselves to your mailing list!

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Article Tags: list building



Related Forum Posts
Re: Biz Plan Competition - i just wanted to say that posting Small Business Events on CanadaOne is a great resource. Thanks Julie!
Re: Eng Lit Academic Site Up For Review - Hi Dave, - The font for the text on the left, the welcome message, is too small. - The copy can be a bit stronger, esp. if i'm going to be purchasing Eng Lit essay. - Mailing list subscription module doesn't really say what's in it for the subscriber. What am I subscribing to? What's the value? - Ad placement of the Amazon widget is questionable. Why the repeat and why the vertical misalignment? - Too much padding on both sides too little room in the middle for crucial information. - Essays on the navigation bar should probably be second from the left. Just my humble opinion. I think the information organization and presentation can be done a bit better.
Revenue Streams for Websites - Too funny, I was just reading a book: Multiple Streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People make extraordinary money on line, by Robert G. Allen. 2001 That's a misnomer, though - they're not ordinary people, they're people with established careers who can take their expertise and exploit it on the web. Ways to generate income? 1) Sell your own material on the site. Ebooks, etc. 2) Join various affiliate programs that match what your website is about. 3) Google adsense - All my money comes from this... it's started out slow but as readership of my sites grown, the income has grown. Nothing to write home about yet... 4) Google adwords - the advertisers whose ads show up on Google Adsense. Unless you're selling big ticket items on your site you don't want to use it, your keywords can cost from 20 cents upwards.
Re: On Which Social Media Sites Are You Most Active? - Follow me on Twitter Join me on Facebook Watch me on YouTube
Re: Email autoresponder messages: what delivery intervals? - Sub-lists are primarily created around the products I own. If my list A was about one topic, I will not promote anything to that list about another topic until I first have them opt-in to another list. Example of this is, let's say you were interested in internet marketing and you opted-in to a list for driving traffic (List A). I will not send information about product creation tips to that list unless I first have you opt-in for another list (List B). These two may be close enough so that might not be an issue, but what I find is most internet marketers drive all their promotions to their one and only list they own. So one day, it's about teaching mom-pop offline businesses about marketing, another day about oh let's market on Facebook, next day about, hey I found great product on promoting stuff on Mobile or cell phones, next week, let's talk about Amazon's Kindle, then Pinterest... You get what I mean. If I have to do above, it will be after subscribers decided not to buy any of my own products. Then I will send other promos to that list. But I think by minimum, it's good to create sub-lists for buyers of your own products so that you can send more advanced and higher end items exclusive to that list.


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