What does every website visitor have that you need? An email address. Why do you need it? Because the better your website is at building a list of hot prospects, the more valuable it is to you. Visitors who may buy from you are hot leads. If you can Estonia Email List collect email addresses from those most interested in your offer, you will be building your target market that you can reach independently of their time on your site.
Jakcob Nielsen is one of the most highly respected authority on website design for improving use. He’s like the founding father of website usability.
He raises this very point about email in: “10 high-profit re-design priorities” where he lists the most important ingredients to sales and profits for a business website (link below).
Nielsen’s #1 tip on the high-profit re-design priority list? Email Newsletters.
Keeping in touch with your visitors once they leave your site is just about the best thing you can do for return on investment, says Nielsen. Newsletters”…keep customers informed and in touch with the company; websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions.” So you can send newsletters to bring your customer back to your site to buy.
He’s not the only prominent researcher with this idea about collecting visitor emails so you can keep in touch. But he’s so influential; we’ll just go with that and agree it’s a great idea.
Email List Building, aka Lead Capture, aka Email Marketing
So how do you implement this newsletter idea? This is also called list-building (you’re building a list of email addresses from visitors). Or lead-capture. Nielsen doesn’t spell out is what it takes to get people to sign up for your email list.
So let’s do that now. Let’s go over the main parts of building a successful email list:
3 Parts to Your Email List Builder System
1: The Technology
2: The Incentive
3: The Implementation
The Technology: You need an email list service to do this right. Don’t worry, you can find free or low-cost solutions. An email list service collects the visitor email addresses in a database for you. More important, it enables each person who signs up to also change or cancel their subscription independently. This is important – it keeps you on the right side of CAN SPAM laws. Finally, it helps your email get delivered. Professional email list services keep your message from getting blocked as junk mail, and get more of your mail into inboxes.
Examples of services you can use to give yourself list building technology:
Feedburner – free and only applicable if you run a blog. It’s a Google signup tool that delivers your blog updates to your subscribers as an email message. You stay in touch by email and liberate yourself from having to re-attract a visitor to communicate. No autoresponder. But excellent free blog-to-email delivery.
AWeber – about $20/month, it does more than Feedburner because it works on any kind of website – whether you publish using a blog or not. And you can set up a sequence of broadcasts that breaks your message down into a series that’s optimal for communicating with your visitor (an autoresponder).
MailChimp – free up to 1000 subscribers, then pricing plans start at $30 for bigger lists of subscribers. Like AWeber, you can build a series of pre-planned messages, that go out on a schedule that starts automatically when your visitor joins a list. Or you can just send out a newsletter to everyone at once – your choice.
Constant Contact – a free 60 day trial. Pricing starts at $15 for 0-500 subscribers. Run an autoresponder series, or send a newsletter, or run a survey.
These are just a few of the more well known tools to build your list. The important thing is to find one you like and get that sign up box posted onto your site.
Then, you’ll need to entice people to give you their email address.
The Incentive: Before people got bombarded with so much email, it wasn’t so hard to build an email list just by posting a signup form. Nowadays, people are not so fast to give up their inbox space for you unless you offer something they want at first sight, and can only get by signing up.
