Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Your Secret to Online Success – Keeping Your Visitors Informed…

You’ve probably heard it said, and it is very true, that it is cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. But have you considered how that saying still holds water when you’re talking about traffic to your site?

Once you get someone to visit your site, the expensive part of the transaction is over.

But what is next?

Once they’ve visited, how do you keep your visitors coming back?

Once they’ve made a purchase, how do you keep them as regular customers?

If you want your visitors to come back, take a minute to consider why they came to you in the first place.

Was it for your great content? Was it for technical help or some other service? Was it to get something for free?

Whatever reason brought your visitor the first time could be the key to getting that all-important repeat visit.

But how will your visitors know they can return and get more of what they want?

You’re going to capture their email addresses so you can tell them so, and you’re going to tell them over and over again.

Maintaining an email list of previous site visitors and customers is an integral part of building your online business. Through your email list you can keep these clients informed about new and exciting offers, information and freebies you’ve placed on your web site since their last visit.

Your email list will be the tool you use to keep your site in the forefront of your clients’ minds.

There are two basic types of tools internet marketers use to manage an email list, an autoresponder or a broadcast script.

An autoresponder is just like the name sounds, it automatically sends responses to someone who has subscribed. You can have these responses timed to just about any interval and you can set them up in advance to send out messages for days, weeks, months or years to come.

A broadcast script is used to send out emails to your list as you write them; you could use this to send out announcements on a sporadic basis, or you could publish a regular newsletter.

Some online auto response scripts allow you to perform a combination of these tasks, sending out regular pre-written emails through the autoresponder and adding occasional broadcasts whenever you want.

Most internet marketing gurus recommend using a hosted service like a hosted solution with its own mail servers, my recommendations would be using Aweber (http://www.aweber.com/) or GetResponse (http://www.getresponse.com/) because these services have an excellent track record of actually delivering emails.

With the proliferation of spam filters, it can be difficult to get emails through, even to those who actually want to hear from you.

A free option would be to send out broadcast emails by starting a private Yahoo Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/) or Google Group (http://groups.google.com/).

No matter what avenue you decide to take – remember that your data-base is gold and you want to keep and maintain your clients. That is one of the secrets of a highly successful business..

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2 comments:

  1. Having an autoresponder is essential to keep the interaction happening with your subscribers -- I am definitely a convert! When I first started a few months ago I thought I could do it all manually... but things have skyrocketed on my website and because of that an autoresponder was vital for my sanity! Since using one, I've had so many people sign up for an e-course I put on line yesterday -- and that was because I could let my subscribers know it was available!

    This is a great article Pamela...

    Jeanne
    http://www.aspirationsplus.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Pamela,

    Thanks for the mention!

    Great point about sending both autoresponder and broadcast emails. This helps you to build and sustain subscriber relationships -- delivering value immediately through the autoresponders, and continuing to do so through broadcasts (since eventually subscribers will get to the end of your autoresponder sequence).

    ReplyDelete

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