Internet Marketing Hints And Tips » email address

Autoresponder Software – Selecting the right one.

Gary Knox — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:45:26 +0000

It can be a reasonably difficult and time consuming job in order to discover the right autoresponder. There are a several choices available on the Internet, each one ranging in both cost and features. Before you decide to purchase your own autoresponder, you should first consider your budget as well as your requirements. This way, you will know what you want and how much you are wishing to spend.

Firstly, you will want to determine the features you want. Next, you will need to take a look at some of the different types of autoresponders available on the market. You will also need to select which type is suitable for you, and which brand name you think would work the best. You can resolve these questions by comparing different brands, prices, features, and licensing restrictions.

For a business, autoresponders can be great. As most of us already know, autoresponders are programmes that will send out an automated response via email to a specified address. In most instances, the reply you get back from an email autoresponder is short and sweet, generally letting you know that someone is on holiday, away from their computer, or that they have received your message.

The only real trouble with autoresponders is the fact that they will respond to any email that they receive. If you are subscribed to a mailing list and used your autoresponder address to sign up, it can easily create a problem. Anytime someone sends you an email to your responder address it will send out an automated reply.

For the Internet marketing guru, there are sequential autoresponders. These types of autoresponders are configured to collect different email addresses then send out a mixture of preset messages through email to subscribers that you have on your list. If you have a sequential autoresponder and use it correctly, it can help you bring back more visitors. It can be a really handy tool to have around, particularly if you work with numerous clients. It can help you keep track of subscribers, as well as keep them informed about what is happening with your business.

All over the Internet there are several types of autoresponders. They range from web based programmes to scripts or programmes that run through your computer or personal server. An autoresponder will be a major component of your online business, which is why you should always invest the time and effort to find the best one for your money. If you put the proper research and time into finding your ideal autoresponder, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and headaches in the long-term.

Fundamentally, there are three primary types of autoresponders that you can select from – remote hosted, locally hosted, and desktop hosted. Remote hosted are hosted on someone else’s server or website. Locally hosted will enable you to work the programme for your own web server. Desktop programmes on the other hand, will allow you to work from your own computer.

Before you decide on which type of autoresponder to purchase, you should make certain that you realise what each type will offer you. There are a variety of autoresponders to choose from, meaning that a few might not offer what you need. You should research each type, and then compare prices and features. This way, you’ll know which type of autoresponder will work the best for your needs and your business.

Refrain from Buying Bulk Mails

Gary Knox — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:53:53 +0000

I am certain that you have unquestionably come across advertisements that read: “1,000,000 email addresses for $29.99”. Additionally these bulk mail companies can even offer you these names on a CD delivered to your doorstep.

Certainly, having 1,000,000 subscribers is the best thing that could ever happen to any Internet Marketer and frequently sounds too good to be true. But very often, it always is too good to be true.

What a lot of novice marketers do not really know is that these bulk companies harvest the email addresses using robots and other wares on the Internet. That is how the 1,000,000 email addresses come about, or whatever the amount is.

Now, the really awful part is that if you buy the so-called 1,000,000 names even at a low price, not only is it a waste of money, you are running a risk of being accused of spamming. I do not doubt how you frequently receive spam mails on Viagra, OEM Software and things you do not even need in your inbox.

That is possible, because of the 1,000,000 names, no one knows you or even ask to be subscribed to your mailing list.

On top of that, not all of the 1,000,000 email addresses are really in use because a percentage of them can either be owned by the same owners (one owner can own more than 1 email accounts) or are obsolete.

When you read such ads again, tell yourself that they are a waste of money.

Converting Every Visitor Into A Subscriber

Gary Knox — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:31:50 +0000

Whenever a person visits your site and leaves, chances are that he or she won’t return, particularly if there are no compelling reasons to do so. After all, we all behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that we can easily forget where we were ten web pages ago.

But the bottom line is that your visitor may not come back to your website again. If 1,000 visitors visit your website, leave and never come back again, you can imagine the amount of potential income lost, merely because they do not return. You could have converted a fraction of the visitors into your customers.

Some Internet Marketing gurus may say that creating unique content will keep some of the visitors coming back, but very often, unique content is not the only answer. The real, long-term solution lies in converting your visitors into subscribers of your mailing list.

Before your visitor leaves your website, you want to convert him or her into your subscriber via a simple opt-in to your mailing list. You do this by asking for your visitor’s name and email address through your opt-in form. In order to achieve this it is often customary to offer some form of incentive in order to obtain their details, this can either be a free report, ebook or piece of software.

And if your visitor signs up to be on your mailing list, you can still follow up with them via email. You can get your subscriber to consider your offer, or endorse another offer to him or her.

All in all, you want to convert as many visitors, if not all, into subscribers as possible and obtain the potential revenue you rightfully deserve – the easy and wise way.

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Building Your List with Give Away Ventures

Gary Knox — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:32:10 +0000

With knowing the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a few years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

This method is more recognized as “starting a Giveaway venture”.

In a literal sense, a Giveaway event is very much like a big time variation of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

Each participating collaborator contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product they are already selling (especially if a new version of the product is due for release) .

The participating partner devises a Lead Capture Page where he affords the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. Put differently, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every collaborator will then endorse the Giveaway event to their own mailing lists.

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one centralised event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download numerous free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

You can easily get advised about a Giveaway event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers frequently or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Using Your Autoresponder to Generate Leads

Gary Knox — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:35:55 +0000

Autoresponders are one of the most important marketing tools that you can have if you are doing business online. In fact, the only thing more important that the autoresponder is your opt-in list! But all autoresponders start out without a list – the list doesn’t exist until your autoresponder mailing list starts filling up with names and email addresses!

The easiest and fastest way to build up an email list is to give things away for free. Some marketers will tell you that this is a waste of time – and if you already have a list of one hundred thousand people that you can market to, then it probably is. But for those who do not already have a list, this is the way that it gets built! You simply pay for advertisement to promote your freebie. Don’t think of this as lost money, think of it as an investment in future earnings.

Give away an ezine, free reports, free ebooks, free access to private websites, or anything else that you can think of. The object is to get people to sign up to receive that freebie, and to agree to receive email from you in the future! It is a win-win situation for everyone, but you get more than anyone else in the deal. The person gets a freebie. You get their name and email address, and permission to email them in the future.

But if you do it right, you get even more than that. The freebie that you give away should also be used to promote your products or services. Even if it just has affiliate links for products or services that are related to the topic of the freebie, it is a way to generate extra revenue. Then, when you send email in the future, you can again promote your products or services. Just be sure to include valuable information in the email as well, or you will have people dropping off of your autoresponder mailing list like flies!

Using every opportunity that is presented to you in the world of Internet Marketing is vital to your success. You have the opportunity to earn money in the freebie that you create, you have the opportunity to earn money when you send the ‘thank you’ email after a person has requested your freebie, and you have the opportunity to earn money every time an autoresponder message is sent out to that list in the future! Don’t waste those opportunities, and put it all in automatic mode with the use of an autoresponder.

Give Potential Customers A Preview With Autoresponders

Gary Knox — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:03:48 +0000

Building customer interest and excitement is the first step to successfully marketing many products. Autoresponders play a vital role in building this interest and excitement. For instance, if you were developing an ebook, you may want to start telling your website visitors and opt-in subscribers about it. Start building interest; tell them what this product will do for them, and how soon it will be available.

Do more than build interest by telling them about it. Use an autoresponder to let them preview your product! Even though you will be selling the product, you can allow your potential customers to preview the information. Have you ever seen previews for movies that will be playing intheaters soon? It is the same concept.

Load one chapter of the ebook into an autoresponder, and put a form on your website where your visitors can enter their name and email address to receive the preview chapter free of charge. This gets their name on your list of potential customer. Each week, send a reminder email, letting them know how close the release date is, and what they can expect from your product – keep building interest and excitement.

Finally, a couple of days before you are ready to launch your product offer those that received the
preview the option to buy a pre-release copy. You can opt to offer a discounted price, or leave the price as it will be on launch day – the choice is yours.

Take a look at the list of people who signed up to receive the preview. How many of them are still ‘subscribed’ to that list? They’ve had the option to stop receiving notices about your product, but they chose to keep receiving the information you were sending. These are highly targeted prospects for your product. They have already shown you that they have an interest in your product, and a large number of those people are simply waiting on the autoresponder broadcast message that will let them know that it is time to pick up their copy of your product!

Isn’t automation a wonderful thing? Using an autoresponder, you are able to see how much of a market there is for your product, and build a great deal of interest in it before it is ever released. This is the key to making sales on launch day. Use autoresponders to build the interest. Get your prospects excited about what is about to come – and on launch day, give them what they are waiting for and watch the sales pour in!

The 3 Things To Avoid When Emailing Your List

Gary Knox — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:55:55 +0000

When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list.

Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many company’s have seized the opportunity and have flooded many people’s e-mail accounts with promotional mail.

But, with an opt-in list, you avoid this annoyance because people subscribe to the list; they want to receive the newsletters and promotional materials. They have consented to being on the list by subscribing themselves, just don’t forget to put an unsubscribe feature everytime in your opt-in list so that you avoid any confusion. There may be times when an email account was provided when the real owner didn’t want to subscribe.

It is essential that you keep your list clean and manageable. Arrange it by using the many tools and technologies available for your opt-in list. Do not worry; your investment in this marketing strategy is well worth it with all the coverage you will get which will likely be converted into sales then to profit.

Keep yourself and your business out of trouble and potential run-ins with the law and the internet service providers. Keep your operation legit and clean. Your reputation as a legitimate businessman and a legitimate site depends on your being a straight and true marketing strategist. As a tip, here are three things to avoid when emailing your list.

1) Take notice of your unsuccessful sends. These are the e-mails that bounce. Bounced emails, also known as undeliverable messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient.

There are bounces that happen or occur because the server was busy at that time but can still be delivered in another time. There are also bounces because the inbox of the recipient is full at that time. There are those bounce messages that are simply undeliverable ever. The reason for this is that it may be an invalid email address, a misspelled email address, or an email address that was abandoned and erased already.

Manage your list by putting markings on those that bounce. Erase an email account from your list so that you have an accurate statistics and records as to how many are actually receiving your mail. You may also want to check the spellings of your email addresses in your list. One common mistake is when an N instead of an M is placed in the .com area.

2) Always provide an unsubscribe feature in your site and an unsubscribe link in your mails. When someone in your list files a request to be unsubscribed, always take that request seriously. If you don’t take them off your list and keep sending them your e-mails, you are now sending them spam mail.

When you are reported as a spammer, you and your business can get into a lot of trouble. You can be reported to the authorities and maybe blacklisted by many internet service providers. You will lose a lot of subscribers this way and many more in potential subscribers.

3) Do not provide pornographic or shocking and disturbing content in your newsletters. It is hard to decipher the age of the recipient and many complaints may stem from these. Controversial issues also are to be avoided to not be branded by your subscribers. Stick to the nature of your site and business.

Always remember these tips in this article so that you can have a healthy relationship with your subscribers as well as be kept within the boundaries of what is allowed in sending mails to an opt-in list.

Build Your Own Mailing List… Even Though You’re an Affiliate!

Gary Knox — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:01:54 +0000

I want to share with you one of the biggest mistakes affiliates make. I want to share this with you so you wont make the same mistake:

The one major mistake many affiliates make is NOT setting up a list!

Affiliates will often send traffic that they generated to affiliate links, rather than a list. When they do this, they are unknowingly making a bet that visitor will buy on first contact. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case.

Visitors often need to be warmed up to a product – through the course of multiple visits and additional information – before they are willing to purchase from a person or a business. This is where building a list comes into play.

By building a list, affiliates can fix this problem. Additionally, they can retain traffic, warm it up, and then direct it to different purchases in the future. This means that it isn’t a one-shot deal: instead, they can attempt to sell the same person multiple products over the course of time.

Now, in order to do this successfully, the affiliate in question must obtain the necessary tools. An autoresponder is required and their are many available to you, whether paid or free, the choice is yours.

Now, in addition to obtaining the autoresponder service, you will need to setup your own site if you do not already own one. If you already own a related site, you can simply add your opt in form to a page on your existing site. If not, I suggest purchasing cheap domain and hosting and using this to host your list forms.

Once you have your site and your autoresponder setup, there are only two steps left: the first is building a course of some sort that is related to the affiliate products you wish to sell; and the second is creating an opt-in form that converts.

The first part is relatively easy. Start by determining your topic and then outline it over the course of five to seven days. Remember that everything should be written as if you are talking to a person, rather than as if you were writing a formal article.

If you do not feel comfortable writing these articles yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter the price for each article will be dependant upon the size. Once you have created your autoresponder series, you will want to feed it into your autoresponder, setup advertisements in the text for the affiliate product you are planning to sell, and then create an opt-in form for your list.

Once you have setup your opt-in form, the only remaining step is to drive various traffic sources to your opt-in list, collect their email addresses – and then wait for the commissions to roll in!

Building Your Mailing List with Downloads

Gary Knox — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:51:15 +0000

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

How to Write a Landing Page that Converts

Gary Knox — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:17:19 +0000

Most people have little or no idea how to write a landing page that converts. Instead, they collect elements that they have seen employed in other landing pages – but generally do not put them together in the same way the owner of the successful landing page did.

One major problem is the copy. And that’s okay. Not everybody is going to be an excellent writer – never mind a copywriter. But as someone selling a product or trying to build a list, it is crucial that you know your strengths and weaknesses – and that you either spend the time to overcome them or hire someone else to do it for you.

With copywriting, for instance, it is important to use a mix of compelling sales points with powerful psychological triggers. Most people who create a sales page miss either one or both of those elements.

For example, they might concentrate to much on building hype that they do not actually explain what solution they are providing – and for whom they are providing it. If I do not have a specific problem that your product solves, why would I buy it? I wouldn’t.

Now, if they fail to sprinkle in psychological triggers, such as “scientifically proven,” “guaranteed,” and “shocking,” no one will feel compelled to continue reading, as the benefits will have a low or average perceived value.

Besides these two problems, some sales pages lack coherency and direction. The copy looks amateurish and it doesn’t slowly grind forward, breaking down the visitor’s resistance to the sale – and compelling him or her to buy more and more at each sales point.

Additionally, if there aren’t multiple calls to action – another form of psychological trigger – then a potential visitor might never feel compelled enough to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

In addition to careful copywriting, there are some other important things you must take into consideration when writing a landing page that converts. For instance, it is important to build a compelling case for a time-bound offer.

Now, this does not mean you have to invent false deadlines and constantly revise them every week. This is a good way to guarantee your complete loss of credibility in the shortest amount of time possible.

However, when planning your copy, you will want to make sure that you constantly urge the reader to act immediately by inserting a number of “calls to action,” as I have mentioned previously.
You may want to consider using fly-ins or pop-ups to create more urgency – or to make a time-bound offer. Perhaps you can use a countdown to build urgency (i.e., when someone arrives at your landing page, they have five minutes to purchase the product at the lowest price).
Now, if you’re creating a squeeze page, you might want to employ slightly different tactics. Rather than building a compelling case with multiple triggers and calls to action over the course of 1000 words, you may want to simply condense that all into a compelling headline and one paragraph of “benefits.”

For a completely free-to-join squeeze page, you more than likely will not have a considerable amount of resistance to joining, unless the visitor:
a) Does not see any benefits; and
b) Suspects that you will sell their email address to spammers.

Both of these problems are comparatively easy to overcome. In your headline, plainly state the exact benefits they will receive for joining – as always, mixing in the necessary psychological triggers.

In the first paragraph of your copy, give them a compelling reason to join now (i.e., the price might go up, the list might become private, you’ll get this amazing report). Now, to overcome the second problem, merely include a short paragraph under your opt-in form that clearly explains that you will not – under any circumstances – spam them or sell or give away their email address and name.