Websites generate sales. That's the whole reason they exist
for many people. And mailing lists also generate sales.
Targeted mailing lists, especially, are valuable; the audience
they are directed at have been identified as interested in a
niche item, and are likely to have a higher per-piece sale
ratio than an audience on a list generated from the phone
book.
Did you know you could leverage the power of the targeted
mailing list for your website sales? It's not spam; you will be
asking people to express interest in you mailing them things
before you send them anything. And it's a great way to get a
list of people you can advertise to as well.
What you're doing is building a subscriber list – a group of
people who like what you offer on your web site so much
they're willing to have their email box filled with more
information from the site. And the primary tool you're going
to use to do it is the excellent original article.
Generating the Interest
The first step in this unique method of creating a pool of
targeted customers is to generate enough interest in your
web site to make the customers want to get more. The best
way to do this is by putting content-rich informative articles
on your website. Whether you write them or you hire
someone to write them for you, these articles should whet
your customer's thirst for knowledge enough to get them to
take the second step: signing up for a newsletter.
You can set the signup area as a form that emails the
customer information back to you, where you'll be
responsible for signing the customer up for the newsletter.
You can also set up an automated system using some freelyavailable
software utilities – in essence, your customer's
emails will bounce to the program sitting on your server,
and the program itself will process the customer's request to
be included on your email list.
No matter how you do it, ensure that the signup process is
as simple, unobtrusive, and quick as possible. Customers
asked to fill out lengthy forms or to jump through multiple
email hoops aren't likely to finish the signup process.
Generating the Subscriber List
The list of emails you now have is your subscriber list. And
those emails are really all you need to run your newsletter
well, provided you have the content to insert into it. You will
need to maintain the list, pruning out dead emails from time
to time, and you should be responsive to any customer
requests to be removed from the list as well.
How you maintain the list and email out the newsletter is up
to you. You can create a group section on Yahoo Groups if
you wish; this is one of the simplest methods of creating
your group, but it also requires that your group emails
include a Yahoo advertisement on each.
You can also create a group email distribution list in your
home or online email as well, and send out your newsletter
by hand when a new issue is ready. The newsletter doesn't
have to be fancier than plain text, though you'll see a few
corporate email newsletters done in HTML; the important
part of the email is that you include good solid content that
the subscribers crave.
Leveraging the Subscriber List
Now that you have a subscriber list, you can do all kinds of
nifty things with it. You can offer subscriber-only sales and
deals; this drives fresh sales to your site, while also making
your subscribers feel special because they've been singled
out to participate in the sale. You can give them special
discount coupons as well.
Or you can sell ad space on your newsletter to other
vendors. Never sell anything inappropriate for your website;
for instance, if you sell sports equipment, gym shoes or
tickets to sporting events would be appropriate, while
information about lawnmowers would not be appropriate and
would probably result in some annoyance among your
customers.
Though you can sell advertising within your newsletter itself,
you should never sell your subscriber's email list. Web
consumers are pretty smart, and it's not hard to figure out
that you've been selling their information to someone
without their consent. This is more likely to drive customers
away than to make them more loyal.
