The most important element of your main theme site is its ability to capture e-mail addresses from visitors. Technically, there are two ways to do this. One is using a web form or web application on your website. The second is using an e-mail link.
Whatever method you use to capture the e-mail, it is mandatory that you assign an additional category to the e-mail address. You have to track where you got the e-mail address. This point is essential; you need to know how you got the e-mail address at all times. This prevents you from being accused of sending an unsolicited e-mail.
To use a form you must be able to access a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) directory on the server. Or if you are using FrontPage, the server your sites are running on must be able to process ASP pages (Microsoft s Active Server Page Technology) or have the FrontPage extensions installed. I use ASP pages and a FrontPage form for a number of reasons that we will look at later.
A mailto: hyperlink is the other way to capture an e-mail address. Remember when someone e-mails you they send their e-mail address with the mail. By embedding a mailto hyperlink in a web page, the only thing the visitor has to do is click on the link. This will start their e-mail software with your e-mail address already entered into a message. While this method may be easier for the visitor, it does have a drawback for you as a marketer.
Depending on their ISP or e-mail service provider, you might receive their e-mail address without their name. Use this method as a bare minimum.
Forms, Entry/Exit Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders
Pop-up windows are small secondary windows that launch themselves when you come into a site or page, when you leave a site or page.
Key Point!
Pop-ups and Pop-unders Will
Always Capture More E-mail
Addresses than a Simple Form!
Speak to the web designer and you will hear that a pop-up window simply annoys your prospects, and will reduce your repeat visits. Esthetically, the pop-up window takes away from the look and feel of the site. You will not find a pop-up window on a web designer s site.
Do not get hung up on the pop-ups are obnoxious factor . If they are more effective at capturing e-mail addresses use the tool. The designers are wrong. The best way to capture e-mail addresses at your content site is by using pop-up windows. In fact, a new type of secondary page called a pop-under is gaining some momentum. A pop-under page opens a second browser window underneath the main window when you visit the site. Going to one website opens two distinct web pages simultaneously.
There are a number of variations on this tactic; however, all of them have one purpose: to capture your e-mail address. It used to be enough to have a place on every page for the visitor to subscribe to your newsletter. A simple enter your e-mail address here and subscribe to my e-zine was all it took to get people to sign up. That approach is not nearly enough today.
A recent report in www.marketingexperiments.com gives a great example of why you should use this tactic.
Remember earlier we said the visitor to your website is selling their e-mail address to you. This secondary window is what you use to let them know what it is you are willing to pay for the right to market to them in the future.
The real question for the small business is how much difference a pop-up subscription window will make on the number of people who give you their e-mail addresses? What is the ratio of unknown e-mail visitors to visitors who willingly trade their e-mail addresses?
What can you trade for the e-mail address? While most websites use a free newsletter subscription, my experience tells me that it is not enough. Think of offers like: Sweepstakes, Low Price/Clearance Alerts, How-To Articles, Top Ten Lists, Reports, or Industry Data. What does your customer find valuable and how can you solve their problem?
The bottom line is that the pop-up and offer have to capture the e-mail address and preferably the name of the visitor.
Make sure that you use a pop-up or pop-under window on your site. The marketing experiments site found that a simple pop-up window increased the number of new subscribers by 190%. More importantly, there were no complaints.
The reason there are no complaints is because the pop-up is not an advertisement. Done properly, the small business site has staked a claim to a niche and is giving the visitor a chance to access the information they are looking for. It gives the visitor the opportunity to exchange their e-mail address for something that is of value to them.
-A pop-up also helps you qualify or disqualify your customers from future offers. By changing what you are providing in the pop-up, you can easily determine the quality and interests of the visitors to your site.
- Using a pop-up requires testing and measurement so make sure you track the ratios of visitors to sign-ups during a pop-up campaign. You can also combine offers. For example, use one type of a pop-up window when with a unique offer when a visitor enters a page. Use another pop-up window with a different offer when the visitor leaves the site. This is what I do on my main site. When you visit a window offering my e-zine subscription pops up, another page actually loads in the background which offers a free virtual seminar by e-mail.
- Pay special attention to the wording of the offer. In earlier times, a straightforward approach worked well. Enter your name and e-mail address and subscribe to the newsletter. Today you need to be explicit about what they are signing up for and what you will do with their e-mail address after you have collected it.
- Secondly, start applying the sales website language structure to the pop-up windows. Users are becoming numb to traditional freebees and giveaways.
Some other ways to capture a visitor s e-mail address are by making your newsletter sign-up form visible on every page. Contests or surveys can also be used to give the visitor a reason to give you their e-mail address.
The most common tactic being used these days is the give away. Usually a downloadable report, e-book or other valuable information is provided in return for the potential client s name and e-mail.
While all of these work to some extent, there is some resistance on the part of more sophisticated web surfers. Frankly, a free report or book might not be enough to bribe the prospect anymore.
Key Point!
To Capture the E-mail Address
You Have To Give the Visitor
Something of Value!
Capture Incentives Due to the above reasons, creating your own opt-in E-mail database is not an easy task. In addition, because of privacy concerns and the fear of spam, many people are reluctant to give out their E-mail address without a good reason to do so. These fears can be soothed by creating a strict privacy policy and sticking to it. However, it is harder to convince your visitors that it would be in their best interest to reveal their E-mail address to you. Fortunately, there are some time-tested solutions available for that problem as well:
- Arrange a sweepstakes with an attractive grand prize, for example one of the more expensive products sold on your site. Require everyone who wants to enter the draw to give out his E-mail address and agree to receive occasional E-mails from you. To get the best possible results, it is advisable to declare that the winner will be contacted via E-mail and needs to claim the prize within 7 days in order to receive it. By doing so, you will eliminate the problem of people giving out bogus E-mail addresses in order to avoid receiving advertisements
- Use the number of registrations as a give away. Ask visitors to subscribe to your newsletter and in return, every 100 th registration wins a prize.
- Open a discussion forum on your site. By only allowing registered users to post, you can collect e-mail addresses and deter pranksters from writing abusive messages at the same time. However, if you decide to use this method to build your list, be very careful. Sending advertisements too frequently to the regulars of your forum may cause them to move elsewhere and thus reduce the traffic to your site.
- Start publishing a newsletter. Although it requires quite a bit of work, an interesting newsletter quickly gathers subscribers and increases the size of your e-mail database. An additional advantage of having a newsletter versus a simple e-mail announcement service is that you will be able to submit to the multiple newsletter directories on the Internet.
- Continue to allow everyone to access most of the content on your site, but also add a "Members only" area that contains articles or other information that is valuable to your visitors. Give out free memberships, but require members to register, reveal their e-mail addresses and allow you to send them an e-mail advertisement every now and then. This idea is especially suitable if you are eventually planning to charge for some of the content you provide. The step from requiring your visitors to register to requiring them to pay is smaller than moving from giving everything for free to fee-based access.
- Whenever you ask your visitors to give out their e-mail address, remember to offer them the possibility to join your opt-in mailing list at the same time. Do you have a form on your site that allows the visitors to contact the webmaster or the sales department? Perhaps you have a Tell-A-Friend script that asks for the sender's E-mail address and name? Both are excellent opportunities to suggest subscribing to your E-mail announcement list or newsletter. If you want to gather a sizeable list of E-mail addresses from your visitors, you should not be afraid of trying hard to get them. Just keep in mind that there is a fine line between being persuasive and being annoying. Do not cross it.
Pop-up Script Tips
There are multiple ways to make your pop-ups more user-friendly. Here are some of my favorites. Try them out and see which ones work for you.
- Imagine this. You arrive at a site and a pop-up ad appears. Being a veteran web user, you close it quickly and continue investigating what the site has to offer. When you open the next page, the same pop-up comes up. Again, one click from your mouse and it is gone. On to the next page and the darn thing pops up yet again! Now you are getting annoyed and start looking for the exit. OK, you probably did not have to imagine that. If you have been on the web for a while, you are likely to have experienced it. Having the pop-up appear once did not feel as bad, but when you had already looked at it and decided that you were not interested in what it advertised, having it come up again and again made the site seem very unfriendly. The moral of the story? Use cookies to identify your visitors and limit the amount of times the same pop-up is shown to the same user. Although it is claimed that, on average, a person has to see the same ad several times before he will react to it, enough is enough.
- Do not use more than one pop-up on a single page. Using multiple pop-ups is unlikely to greatly increase the response rate to your advertising, but it will ensure that the patience of your visitors wears thin a lot faster. A horde of pop-ups appearing at the same time may crash some browsers and slow older computers down to a crawl.
- Consider launching your pop-ups at the moment users exit your site rather than when they arrive at it. This is likely to make your advertisements seem less distracting, because at that point your visitors have already finished using your site and found the information they were looking for. If you choose to use exit pop-ups, remember that they offer an excellent opportunity to retain contact with a visitor that may otherwise be lost in cyberspace. A pop-up to bookmark your site or subscribe to your newsletter is likely to work better at this stage, as the user has already seen that you run a high-quality site.
- Just like all other forms of advertising you use, your pop-ups should offer content that is relevant to the topic of your site. For example, it is a much better idea to have a pop-up that sells subscriptions to Sports Illustrated on your Boston Bruins fan site than a pop-up for an Internet casino. Not only does it get a better response rate, but it also makes your site look more professional.
- Every time you add pop-up advertisements or adjust existing ones, keep a close eye on how your audience reacts to the changes. Your visitor count, the time an average visitor spends on your site and the number of pages viewed per visitor is all-important meters that will promptly notify you of any possible problems.
Key Point!
Word of Mouth is The Best Way
to Advertise.
Tell a Friend
How many times have you wanted to let a friend know about a site that they should know about? Want an easy way for other people to be able to do that on your site?
These tell a friend scripts give your visitors an easy way to send their friends an e-mail with your website link already included in the e-mail.
Visit http://www.tellafriends.com to get a customized script for your website. All you have to do is cut and past a hyperlink into your pages on your website and these free services take care of the rest.
E-books
I have included e-books as a way to capture e-mail addresses for a secondary reason. While an e-book can be used to educate and pre-sell your prospects, it can also be used as a mobile website.
An e-book, for those who have not read one, is a digital book. Two types are popular, Adobe Acrobat and then an executable HTML book . You need to purchase software to create both types. Acrobat has free reader software and the HTML book installs itself on your hard drive.
Key Point!
People Still Love Any Kind of
Book!
I use adobe acrobat software to create my e-books.
Rather than distributing content in an e-book, you can distribute Links to content. These links may be to content on your site or related sites. They can be your list of personal bookmarks, additional downloads, free software, etc. and a detailed explanation on how to use the links.
If the content of an e-book is valuable, it will be passed between contacts. Word of mouth is the key distribution method for small business and an e-book is an easy format to transmit within an individual s circle of influence.
So create an e-book that requires an e-mail registration or a request for further details. Write a 10-page report (e-book) on the content that is contained in the links. Then set up the pages or information to be distributed by e-mail. If someone clicks on any of the links, they are directed to your information site. As a result, you have the opportunity to capture their e-mail address or, even better, set up a special e-mail address to reply with the attachment or information they requested. In both cases, the goal is to add their name and e-mail address to your list.
How to Manage Your List of E-mail Addresses
Web Based Options
A common option is to use a third party e-mail list service. This type of service is often called a listserv. Designed for managing electronic newsletters, this service allows people to join or remove themselves from your list. It also allows you to send e-mail to the entire list quickly and easily by just sending a single message to your listserv. The software takes care of everything, sending the message to everyone on the list, deleting bad addresses and removing those that do not want to receive your messages anymore. There are many free list services available today. They are free because every message that you send includes one of their ads.
Purchase ListServ Software
You can also invest in your own list server program and run it on one of your own computers. This removes the ads in the messages and allows you to send personalized messages to every person on your list. The downside is that as your list grows the length of time it takes to send out the message increases.
This can also cause problems if you only have a dial up Internet account. Are you prepared to tie up the phone line for a couple of hours each time you want to send a message to your list?
Key Point!
Your Contact List Is More
Important Than Your Web Site!
Contact Management/Your Own Mail Server
I recommend a dedicated contact manager and mail server for your Internet marketing program. There are some really good reasons for this.
YOUR CONTACTS THAT INCLUDE VALID E-MAIL ADDRESSES ARE GOLD
The whole reason you have a main content rich website is to capture and manage e-mail addresses. Your Internet business is only as good as your e-mail list. In fact, your e-mail list is more important than your website. I know of one prominent Internet marketer who has earned the right to market to more than 1 million e-mail addresses. His list is gold. If all of his websites were removed, I guarantee you that he would still be able to earn a huge income with just his contacts and their e-mail addresses.
A good contact manager captures all of your interactions with your customers, potential or existing.
The best solution for a contact manager is one that includes an e-mail client. This means that your e-mail correspondence, sales, appointments, call and to- do items are all coordinated in a single application.
Not only will it send e-mail for you, a good contact manager can send a series of automated and personalized e-mail. As we will learn later, this is the key to Internet marketing. Your ability to automatically send a series of targeted and personalized e-mail over time to your contact list directly controls how successful you will be.
The best part of using a good contact manager is its ability to become a single source for all your contact information. This means every message that goes out is sent to a single person and the content of the message can be unique to them.
Key Point!
Use Contact Management Software
to Keep Track of E-mails Instead
Of A List Server!
If you use a listserv, what will you do with any information that you have collected from forms on your website? What about names and e-mail addresses that you pick up from traditional advertising? Having to manually import names and keep separate lists for different products, services, etc. quickly becomes painful.
I run my complete contact database on software called Goldmine. I currently have 39,000 contacts in my database. All of my personal e-mail is generated with it and the best part is that every form on any of my websites automatically creates new records in the database or updates existing contact records.
A contact manager is vital if you are serious about your contact list.
As you grow your business you will also find that a contact manager s ability to categorize and organize your contact list is extremely important. This allows testing and refinement of your marketing as you learn more and become more sophisticated.
Three common contact managers that allow you to do e-mail and automated sequences of personalized messages are: GoldMine, ACT and Maximizer. Make sure to buy and use contact management software.
Interactive Tools
The idea of building community and the goal of using online interaction as a way to foster and build relationships really started with the growth of large portals in the late 90s. The portal business model was based on advertising revenues. If the portal could provide a website that the visitor would return to voluntarily, they could create a community of like-minded users whom the advertisers would want to influence. Initially the portal provided value to the community with content. To differentiate themselves, the portals started to experiment with services that allowed like-minded individuals to interact with each other. These services took the form of Online Chat Session, Discussion Boards and Instant Messaging applications.
If you have enough customers you might be able to charge for access to your interactive tools. I use a free discussion forum and a chat room on my site www.webmarketingforsmallbusiness.com. I use the interactive tool as a bonus. The subscribers are already paying a monthly fee that gives them access to online sales and marketing training. I provide the discussion board as a method for them to discuss common sales and marketing issues. If you cannot monetize the use of these tools I do not recommend using them. They will take more time to administer than the value that they provide.
Key Point!
Syndicating Content is The
Easiest Way to Get In Front Of
Other People s Existing Web
Traffic!
Syndication
Want to grow really fast? Get your content syndicated. By including your content in other people s sites you improve the chance of someone finding out about you and your business. Want to see what a syndication service looks like? Third party companies provide a service where you can add content to your site with a couple of simple lines of HTML code. When a visitor opens the page with this dynamic link on it, your page is automatically filled with articles collected from other sites across the web. These articles are organized around categories that you decide when you set up your service. You can look at some high-end examples of third party syndication at www.isyndicate.com, www.yellowbrix.com, www.screamingmedia.com, and www.moreover.com.
Think about how much leverage you can get with this type of approach if you offered your articles and content to anyone who wanted them. Your articles, reports, audio files, videos, and messages could be viewed on thousands of sites across the web with every message containing a link back to your main theme site.
It is actually not that hard to do. I offer a syndicated service to any visitor who wants to listen to my Internet radio station. In fact, I have also added an affiliate program to my syndicated station. Anyone can have their own Small Business Heroes radio station on their website. As an added bonus, if a listener follows one of the links in the station to my website and buys a product I send a 40% commission to them. It is a great deal for me. I get traffic and exposure to my messages and websites and the site that adds the station gets great content and a 40% split on any sales.
To find out how to add your content to other people s sites, visit William Bontrager s site at www.willmaster.com. William s site is jam packed with great tools to make your site interactive, including a self-syndication script. This simple script allows you to create a link that puts your content on other people s websites. Once you have the script set up you can make it available to anyone who wants to include your content on their website. They insert the HTML code on their website and every time you update your articles, reports etc. they are automatically updated on all of the sites that have a link to your syndicated content.
Software Web Applications
Does your bank provide online banking? How many times a week do you visit your bank s website to use this online service? Perhaps there is a web application or software that you can run on your website to provide value to your customers. Applications on your website can provide additional reasons for your visitor to stay at your website and may be enough of an incentive for them to give you their e-mail address. The more compelling your web application or web service, the more likely your visitor will provide their e-mail address.
You don t have to be a software programmer to add web applications to your website. There are thousands of free or inexpensive web applications available online. For example visit www.willmaster.com and you will see a number of ways to make your site interactive with software applications. In the resource section at the back of the book you ll find a listing of sites with scripts and applications that you can add to your site today.
Membership Has its Privileges
American Express has built its entire business on this premise. In the late 80s a number of studies were done to determine the core Values of consumers. One of the largest of the five main categories that came out of Values and Lifestyles Study - VALS was called the Belongers.
American Express
Told Me!
Membership Does Have Its
Privileges!
Like the name suggests, the key value or driving force in a Belongers decision-making criteria is the ability to fit in, to be the same and accepted by the group. You see this group of people striving to fit in. They wear the latest fashion; follow trends and struggle to keep up with popular culture. For a Belonger to be successful, they have to be part of the group.
Want their e-mail addresses? Provide a Membership section on your site. Provide a Members Only section with additional content. How do people receive access to this additional content? - With their e-mail address, of course.
You can use a number of strategies with Members Only sections on your theme site. Ask your website host to password protect a directory on your website called /members, for example. Create a simple username and password combination that all users can enter to visit the members section of the website. If you want to get more sophisticated, you can get your web host to set up a special script or form that users must complete before gaining access. In addition to a name, e-mail address, username and password you can ask for as many details as you want. My recommendation is to get the name and e-mail address, enough to start building a relationship, and then grow from there. Unless what you are giving away in the Members Only section is of high value to the customers, intimate questions and what amounts to an interrogation will result in you losing a prospect and an e-mail address.
If you decide to use this strategy, make sure that you actually provide the members with some value added information or services. This is especially true if you set them up as a member and then immediately start sending e-mails trying to sell them something.
If you are going to have a special members section, make them feel special. Include personal attention, additional articles or rich media content as their incentive to join.
You need to promote a Members Site. Make your special members visible with testimonials and endorsements of their products or services if applicable. Have them tell in their own words how much additional value they receive by belonging to the Members Only section.
Having a Members Only section can also provide long-term financial benefits. Many websites that started out with the idea of a membership have converted their members to become a recurring revenue stream for their business.
www.webmarketingforsmallbusiness.com started out as a simple weekly Members Only program. Each Monday morning I did a live online sales training session and then added the training session to an archive. Members where able to review the training sessions, but Non-members did not have access. Once I had enough content in the library, I began selling subscriptions instead of giving away memberships. You can visit www.webmarketingforsmallbusiness.com to check it out right now.
Membership as a revenue stream gets rid of the once and done syndrome. Instead of always looking for your next sale, consider setting up your revenue over a period of time. Turn a customer into a steady client.
Members Only ideas that you might want to consider include:
- Of the Month Club
- Of the Day
- Of the Week
- Games
- Contest
- Video, Audio and Multimedia Content Instead of Plain Text
Key Point!
Members and Recurring
Revenues are GOLD!
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