Black Belt Web Marketing.pdf - Costa del Sol

Exercise 8-1 -- Building Your Email List
Getting greater number of visitors to your site by itself may not bring about the web success
you had hoped for. Visitors who come, go, and don’t return offer little benefit. Traffic stats
may be impressive but they are having minimum impact on the success of your web site.
These visitors aren’t nearly as valuable as those who leave something behind: an order, a
request, permission to be contacted.
Many web sites would be better off if they focused on establishing a long-term, one-to-one
relationship with their visitors than trying for an immediate sale. The best way to begin
striving for the personal relationship is to provide visitors with an incentive to leave their
name, email address, and permission – explicit or implied – to contact them in the future.
Imagine how successful your web site will be if you have a contact database of 1000, 5000,
10,000 or more of people who want you to email them information, announcements,
updates, etc. Building a large email list, certainly a long-term project, gives you a
tremendous advantage over other web sites.
Most of the names on your list will come from visitors to your site who were encouraged to
sign up, often in return for something of value. Other sources include people who e-mailed
you to be added. They may not have web access but nevertheless want to take advantage of
the incentive you gave visitors for visiting your site. They may have read about your offer in
a posting to a discussion group or in your signature.
A third source is prospects that you added as a result of your web surfing activities or
participation in discussion groups. With the intent of building relationships one at a time,
capture names off the net that are likely prospects for the product or service offered at your
web site. Email them a personal note, not junk e-mail. If contacting individuals found in a
discussion group, tell them you noticed their message and wanted to introduce yourself.
Invite them to visit your site for information that you feel they will be interested in.
If the results from prospecting in discussion groups warrant it, you could search in
directories and search engines for likely places to find more prospects. This is a slow,
day-by-day technique for building your email list but one that could be rewarding.
Getting Them to Sign Up
Next, you need to figure out what incentive to use to encourage people to give you their
name and email address. In keeping with the free mentality of the Internet, you almost
certainly have to give something away or at least offer a chance to win something of value.
It must have value to your target audiences, not necessarily to the general public.
Lesson 8 Pg. 4