STEP FIVE: FLOOD YOU MINISITES WITH TARGETED TRAFFIC

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Chapter 18 - How-to Lead Visitors to Your Mini-sites.

Everyone involved in the Internet marketing business has their own personal beliefs about what is the right way or wrong way to get motivated buyers to a site. Some people say that search engines provide all their traffic while others insist that they get very little from search engines. Some myths that I have heard include:

 - 90 percent of your business will come from people finding your site while searching.
 - Search engine traffic is free.
 - The way to get buyers is to submit to the thousands of search engines.

The challenge is that some of these claims may be true. In the end, sales are dependent on qualified buyers coming to visit your sales pages and then ordering your products and services. As long as they get there and they order that is OK.

I am not hung up on how you get them to your mini-site as long as they get there. However, if I have the choice of having them find me and then go or me already knowing who they are and then sending them to the mini-site directly, I will always take the second option. If you have the choice, you want to be in control of your own traffic.

That is why we spent so much time in step 3 when we looked at building your list. When you have a good e-mail list, you control your own destiny online.

You directly control:

1. How many times and how often a prospect will be involved in a structured online sales process.
2. Exactly what their purchase options are when they are involved in that process.

So if you want to send prospective customers through an online sales process in the form of a one page mini-site how do you do that?

Send them a series of specially formatted e-mails.

More importantly, or you want to automate this process as much as possible.

Why E-mail?

In March of 2002, Gartner Group reported that more US businesses are using e-mail marketing campaigns instead of traditional direct mailings. Gartner goes on to say that e-mail marketing has become the cost effective way to acquire and retain customers.

 - E-mail is the number one reason people are online. In the US, e-mail users actually outnumber web users by 10% (96.6 million to 87.9 million).
 - E-mail is used in both the home and the workplace.
 - Over 1 billion e-mail messages are sent daily in the US alone, and the numbers are growing around the globe.
 - E-mail is an integral part of a daily routine for people and is a necessity for communication between friends, family and co-workers.
 - Nearly 9 in 10 family households with annual incomes of $75,000 or more had at least one computer and about 8 in 10 had at least one household member who used the Internet at home.

A small business may be facing a problem at this point. If you are a small business, your list is too small. If you are just getting started and do not have the budget or time required to drive traffic to your main website it is tough to capture e-mail addresses. A small business with no traffic and no list is going to stay small. If the list is the key to selling online how can you leverage what you have learned?

Learn from the mistakes of others. E-mail marketing is the online version of direct marketing. Direct marketers have already done a lot of testing. Learn from their mistakes:

1. Do you have a valid profile of the group that you are sending to? Do you really know your audience?
2. What list are you using? What is the quality of the list?
3. Are you making the right offers to this audience?
4. Do you have a clear objective or purpose for every piece that you mail out?
5. Are you telling the reader exactly what you want them to do?

E-mail Clients

In Step 2, we looked at ways to keep track of your list of captured e-mails. Now you have to do something with the e-mails that you have captured. You have to send targeted messages over time to your list of captured e-mail addresses.

If I asked you what e-mail software you were using, most people would answer Microsoft Outlook or Express, Eudora, Netscape, etc. Those names all refer to e-mail software and e-mail client software is designed for individuals who want to send messages to other individuals. They do a great job of doing this on a day-to-day basis. What they do not do well is AUTOMATICALLY send a series of personalized messages over a set period of time from custom templates.

If your e-mail software does not do that, do not use it for creating, sending or managing your e-mail campaigns.

Your e-mail marketing software has to be able to:
 - Send responses and follow-up messages with absolutely no ads on them, ensuring that your potential customers are focused on reading your marketing copy, not someone else's! (Builds trust quicker too!)
 - Follow up with your lists unlimited times.
 - Collect any additional information about your prospective customers (like their phone number, ZIP code, state), not just their names and e-mail addresses.
 - Automatically personalize your messages with the individual s contact and history information.
 - Track your lists and where each customer is in a series or track of e-mails.
 - Give the option of sending messages in text or HTML format.
 - Allowing visitors to add themselves or remove themselves automatically from any list.
 - Send an unlimited number of e-mails.
 - Allow an unlimited number of e-mails to be added to a response track.
 - Allow an unlimited number of tracks to be added or updated at any time. Allow an unlimited number of templates for e-mails.
 - Import an unlimited number of contacts.

While I use Goldmine to do this, there are a number of third party programs that might meet your requirements. GetResponse is a web based service with a free trial. You may also decide to purchase software directly to manage your lists and campaigns. Two that I have investigated in are MailLoop and GroupMail. All of these e-mail marketing programs are listed in the resource pages at the end of the book.