email advertising

The benefits of email advertising

Many of the large companies on the Internet find new customers through different email advertising campaigns. You can probably tell that many companies use this if you get hundred of emails a week offering different products or services.

You, like many others, probably find this process rather annoying; however, companies have found that with a good email list, they can generate about a 7-15% visit rate to their websites through this advertising medium. Therefore, this is a strategy that you will not want to ignore for your business.

How to collect email addresses

There are many ways to collect email addresses. Listed here will be three of the most effective methods:
Purchase email lists
Autoresponders
Pop-up windows

1. Purchase email lists
There are many companies that offer email lists that you can purchase and utilize for your website. These lists range in price and quality, but the general rule is that to get a decent list, it will cost a good amount of money.

Any time Internet users purchase or register for something online, they are usually asked to select boxes related to their interests to be sent more information on those particular topics. These are called opt-in and opt-out email lists.

An opt-in email list is where someone would actually select the appropriate box related to his or her interests. An opt-out list is where boxes are pre-selected and the Internet user has to deselect the box so that they are not sent the information.

You can purchase these lists from many different resources; however, they can be quite expensive if it is a good list. Two companies to look at in purchasing such lists are www.postmasterdirect.com and www.yesmail.com. If you’d rather not spend the money to purchase your lists, there are ways to create your own, and those ways are through the use of autoresponders and pop-up windows.

2. Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a tool that allows you to collect email addresses as people visit your website and request info from you. Your main goal as people visit your website should be to get them to purchase from you. Your second goal should be to collect their email address. Email addresses in Internet marketing are like gold, and autoresponders can help you to create your own email database without having to purchase an email list.

The key to an effective autoresponder is to have a good headline. For example, if you have Click here to subscribe to our guest book, nobody will ever subscribe to it. So the key is to have a headline that provides information that people would be interested in. Think about your potential customers and the type of information that they would be interested in and provide that in the headline. For example, if you are selling camping gear, you could say something like Enter your email address now to get 10 secrets to improve your camping experience. This would be something that people would more likely be interested in on a camping website.

There are many places where you can get free autoresponders for you website, a couple great ones are the following:
www.royal-responder.com
www.getresponse.com
www.infogeneratorpro.com

On those websites you can sign up for a free autoresponder and get that added to your website. Usually you will just need to copy and paste some HTML code to your site to get it going.

3. Pop-up windows
A third method of collecting email addresses is to utilize pop-up windows. A pop-up window is a window that appears on your screen as you go to a website. These windows can either pop up in front of the page that you are looking at, or they can pop behind the page. Pop-up windows force you to take action: either close the window, or click on it to learn more.

Most people find pop-up windows as rather annoying. This is because usually they do not relate at all to what is being searched for, so people just close them. However, pop-up windows can be effectively used to gather information, like email addresses, of people that visit your website. The key is to have a pop-up window that relates to what the visitor to your site is interested in. For example, if you are selling camping gear, you can have the pop-up window offer a contest for a free monthly shopping spree giveaway on your website if a visitor enters their email address.

Pop-up windows basically fulfill the same purpose of autoresponders; however, pop-up windows do a much better job collecting those email addresses because they force the visitor to either enter their email address or close out the pop-up window.

A great place to get a pop-up window program for your website is at www.marketingpopup.com. You can sign up there and then customize the pop-up window to offer anything that you would want.

What to do with those email addresses

Now that you’ve collected those email addresses either through purchasing a list or creating your own, the question is what do you do with them? One of the main things that you can do with email addresses is back-end advertising. Back-end advertising consists of sending advertisements to those on your email list offering your products or services.

The statistics show that Internet surfers will visit a website 7-10 times before they actually purchase anything. Therefore, you will want to get those visitors back to you site as much as possible if you want to make them customers. A great way to do that is through back-end advertising.

Another thing that you can do with those email addresses is called email exchanging. This consists of finding websites that complement your own and have some type of email list of their customers. Then you can offer to email your database of email addresses an ad or offer that would advertise their website in return for them to send an email to their database offering your products/services.

You would never want to just give out your email list to another company. So you would have them write the ad, and then you would just send it out. You could do this each month with a new company and really build up your customer base very quickly. And the great thing about this is that it’s free. You are just exchanging services.

Creating ezines or newsletters is another use for your email list. You could send out a monthly email with free tips and information to your potential customers. In this email you could have the free tips, an ad for your products/services, as well as an ad for another company, like an email exchange. Therefore, with the use of a newsletter you can apply all these strategies to your potential customers.

Online websites and resources

www.postmasterdirect.com
www.yesmail.com
www.royal-responder.com
www.getresponse.com
www.infogeneratorpro.com
www.marketingpopup.com