Email Marketing Tips

If you want to know what separates the sites and online businesses that make the big money from the ones who just "do ok", a lot of times it's the strength of their email marketing campaigns.  You would be surprised at how many blogs and ecommerce sites do not even have an email list.  These same site owners will spend hours working on getting traffic to their site via pay-per-click, social media, or search engine optimization but if the visitor isn't converted on that first visit, a lot of times they are lost forever.  If this is you then how much money can you be losing out on?  Not having a way to stay in touch with your visitors is wasteful and if you want to increase the stickiness of your site so visitors keep coming back then you have to use email marketing.

For most of my sites, my number one goal is to capture leads.  Everyone that comes to my site is going to see the newsletter signup box in the corner and I'll even have a pop up window that hovers over the page when they first visit.  This ensures that anyone who is interested in receiving further updates from me, will have the chance to do so.  If you have a lot of quality leads that opt in to receive offers, updates, or even just news about the niche you cover or topic you promote, then you have a potential source of constant income.  Without further delay, here are some email marketing tips that I use for each site that I create.

1.  Start Building Your List Immediately - Even if you just put up your blog or site and do not currently have any visitors, you still want to make sure you are set up to capture leads.  Before long people will start visiting your site, and when they do you want to grab their information quickly and easily or else they might leave and never return.  You won't get a second chance, so why leave money on the table?

2.  Use a Quality Provider From the Start - A lot of sites have gone down the wrong path here.  If start your site with the idea that you can build your business without spending any money whatsoever to get your site going you simply are not going to succeed.  Trust me when I say that spending $19 per month on an account with Aweber will be one of the best returns on investment that you can make.  Aweber does a great job of delivering messages, and one reason is that they do not tolerate spam.  That means that if you start out with another company when you build your list and want to add those subscribers to Aweber down the road, they are going to have to opt-in again.  You can bet that under 25% of your current list is going to re-opt in, so why not retain all of those leads right from the start and save yourself the headache.

3.  Only Send Relevant, Quality Information - Do not bombard your list with stuff they are not going to want.  If you are running a blog or a site designed around training dogs, then only send them updates when you find a quality ebook or product that you personally use with your own pet and can recommend.  This way you are going to be making money off your list via an affiliate deal (earning a commission off the sale of the ebook when your leads make a purchase) yet you will also maintain your relationshp and build trust with your readers.  If you send them a daily update on everything under the sun, they are going to see that you are just trying to exploit them and will quickly opt out.

The number one tip I can offer anyone with a website is to start using email marketing.  With the next post I'll cover best practices for capturing email marketing leads.

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• How To Increase Email Subscribers
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How To Increase Email Subscribers

Having an effective newsletter campaign is a key part to maintaining an online presence, whether you run a business or just have a site that earns revenue from advertising space.  You want to be able to maintain a relationship with your visitors and by having them sign up to be an email subscriber you stand a great chance of them coming back on a continual basis after their first visit.  Today I'm going to share some of my secrets on how you can increase email subscribers to your site.

Marketing Software

I strongly recommend Aweber for sending out your newsletter.  They are one of the best in the industry and have a variety of tools that I use to both get more subscribers and to engage the ones that I already have.  Not to mention that they are extremely reliable and have a great delivery rate as well, so your emails won't get marked as spam by email providers.

Subscribe Form

Most webmasters will use a simple form on their site that says something like "Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter" or something similar to that.  If you are currently using this method then there is no doubt you can increase the rate of email subscribers using a few of our simple ideas.

Special Offer

The first thing that I recommend doing is to create a special offer for subscribers.  If you own a blog you can start by creating an ebook compiling the "best of" posts on your blog.  If you have a substantial number of posts new readers probably aren't going to want to go back and read every single article you have, so summarize it up into an ebook and offer it for free to everyone who signs up for your newsletter.  If you offer a product or service on your site then you can also increase signups by offering users a coupon for 5% off any purchase simply by signing up for your newsletter.  You can then use Aweber's broadcast system to automatically sent the user a link to the ebook or that contains the coupon for the discount.  Simply by giving visitors an incentive to sign up you will get more email subscribers.

Pop Over Form

Instead of using just your usual subscriber form, why not include a pop over as well?  This is just a small browser window that appears over your website with the subscribe form, plus you can add your special offer in there to entice users to sign up.  This is more invasive than just having a form on your site, but I haven't notice anyone complaining and the results have been overwhelmingly positive as far as the number of additional subscribers go.  Plus with the Aweber system you can set the time so the pop over either never shows up again if they click off, or waits a certain amount of days before reappearing.

Do you have any other ways you increase email subscribers?  I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

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