| May 2006 -- Issue 66 Valeriu S. Popescu, Editor and Publisher The Internet Marketing Profits Center, Inc. Past issues available on newsletter archive ISSN: 1583-4180 phone: +40-332-107122 fax: 1-925-666-2853 email to the editor anytime at: Marketing Online Since 2000 |
![]() |
|
This issue includes: 1) "How to Make a Hyper Responsive Opt-In List Work!"2) "Keep Your Opt-in List Squeaky Clean And Avoid Dangerous List-Management Blunders With These Four Easy-To-Implement Strategies."3) "Classified Ads."4) "Tell Us What You Think!"
Getting the attention of people to buy a certain product or service nowadays is challenging. There were times in the past when telemarketing was at times more of a nuisance rather a convenience to people. The same goes for sales people who would go house to house and show a product and were simply turned down. Now as people have embrace the digital age, there is a faster way of doing it as that is through hyper responsive opt-in list/s. This is basically creating a mailing list and sending the information to people which will contribute to sales. A person can do it in the office or at home and it can only be done if one is serious about making profits online. This can work for people who want to do it full time or for those who just want some extra cash and do it part time. Here are some benefits and features of using hyper responsive opt:
To give further detail how it works, here is the step-by-the step process of a hyper responsive opt-in list specially design when you create a new product or service. (I) The first thing to do is to determine what customers needs. It should be a product or a service that should provide a solution of some kind that will improve the quality of life either at home or at work. Marketing a product especially new ones takes time and money to establish itself. Profit is not made in the first sale but occurs when the customer decides to buy again or through repeat sales. (II) The next is to do the proper research. If the business is done with a group of people or a single proprietorship, it is best to brainstorm for the best possible brand or product name. It should be catchy and will easily be remembered. Given that, there are probably others who have been in the business longer, so it is best to think of other names just in case yours cannot be used. (III) A product of good quality should be sold at a decent price. Sometimes, a similar product/service you thought about is already available on the market. To be competitive, you must figure out a way to convince people why this product is better than the other leading brands. What features does it have that your competitor doesn't? What makes it unique and what service can it give as well? (IV) The right equipment and machines for the job. These could be merchandise that is either physical or electronic and an online ordering system. To be successful with your business, you should be sure that the goods that a customer will order from you can be delivered on time. If there are any problems, a customer support staff or system should be ready to cater to that. Keep in mind that you do not need a 'wonder' product to make it work. All it takes is a list of people who you can contact without being accused of spamming.
An opt-in list can be quite crucial to any site or internet based company. Even for a small venture such as a niche profit site, an opt-in list can make a world of difference and also put some extra profits into your pocket. Rarely would you see an e-commerce site, big or small, that is without an opt-in list! An opt-in list allows for a company to market their wares and site via an e-mail. With an opt-in list, a site and a subscriber consents to sending and receiving messages from your company. Through this, you can keep your subscribers abreast of what is currently available in your site as well as whatever is coming out. And because there is mutual consent between the two parties, any email sent to the list is not considered as spam mail. There is a great number of successfully read promotional materials such as catalogs, newsletters and such that are sent because the subscribers themselves have signed up for them, meaning, they do want to be sent those items. Building a list is crucial, but only a small percentage of your web site visitors subscribes for an opt-in list. Many people find promotional emails annoying, but of you provide good promotional materials, you will see your list build up and grow. You can also achieve this by having good content on your site. If people like what they see and read on your site, then they surely would want more. Newsletters would be a way to attract them back to your site. A little teaser or appetizer if you will. But other than marketing your wares and your services, an opt-in list can also be used to make some extra profits. Not all lists can be used though. It would be good to first build a successful list with a good number of subscribers. The more targeted subscribers you have, the more money you can get. Here are seven ways to make money using nothing more than your list. 1) Place advertisements. There are many companies who will be willing to pay big bucks to put their banners and ads on a list with many subscribers. Selling or renting out lists is not a good idea so rather than doing that, many companies would just rather place ads with lists that have a huge subscriber base. Your messages can have many ads and each one spells money for you. 2) Have affiliations with other companies that have at least a semblance or relation to what your site is about. Here other companies will provide links and brief descriptions of what they offer, products and services. With every click made on the link that directs or leads a subscriber from your list to their site, the company will pay you. This is called P4P or pay-for-performance. 3) Make deals with other companies by asking for a small percentage of sales done through your list. With every sale done by customers that have come from your list and have gone there because of your message, the other company will pay you a small percentage of your sales. The more people who buys from them, the more earnings you get. 4) You may also get products from other sites on a consignment basis and sell them to your list via your email marketing campaigns. Place descriptions, articles and photos of the product in your email messages. There will be those who will buy because they now have trust on you. Now you can order full resale rights for various products, sell them to your list and keep 100% of the price! 5) Sell ebooks or a compilation of your articles to your list. Manuals and how-to articles are in great demand. Many people will be willing to shell out money to gain knowledge about a certain topic and subject. With your existing list trusting your expertise in that area, an ebook could be offered and sold, or used as an incentive. 6) Create a network out of your list. Get people to invite more people to view your site and subscribe to your list. The larger your list is, the more people will be able to click on your links and affiliate links as well as make your advertisement rates higher. 7) Subscribers are willing to pay for information if they know that it can be trusted and relied upon. Use your list to get more and more people to subscribe to you as well as browse your site. Lastly, you can use your list to earn money by making them your partners. Your list will be the bloodline of your growth and increase. Conclusion Any relationship takes time to build it, especially when email is involved. Knowing what your customers want and expect is half the battle. Meeting their expectations is the other half. Much to Learn, Much at Stake!
Here's the simple truth: if your site isn't collecting opt-in e-mail addresses from your visitors, you're losing money. I'm always blown away by the number of sites I visit that don't have a place for visitors to leave their e-mail addresses, but I think I've finally discovered the reason why every site doesn't take advantage of this essential marketing strategy... People are convinced that the process of adding this function to their site is complicated. It's not! Getting set up is quick and easy -- you DON'T have to be a programmer to do it -- and your opt-in list will quickly become your most valuable sales vehicle. Of course, once you've started collecting opt-in e-mail addresses, the process of managing them can get scary pretty fast if you don't know what you're doing. So take it from me: the best way to approach the job of managing your lists is to learn from someone who's been doing it -- successfully -- for a while. Here are a few tips and techniques that we use to keep our opt-in list under control... strategies that helped us generate $2.4 million from e-mail marketing last year alone! These techniques are easily applied to any business, so even if you're already collecting opt-in e-mail addresses, I think you'll find the following list management tips highly valuable! Getting Started With Your Ow Opt-in List Don't have your own opt-in list yet? Don't worry! Getting started is much easier than you might think, and once it's up and running the process of collecting opt-ins will be on autopilot for good! First things first: you need to put a web form on your site to collect e-mail addresses from your visitors. (A web form simply provides a place for your visitors to enter their name, e-mail address, and any other information you want to ask them for.) This form contains a script that will automatically send you an e-mail every time someone opts in to your list, telling you their name, e-mail address, and any other information you asked them to provide. Any HTML editing program, like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, will help you set this up easily, and if you're looking for a free resource that shows you how to do it, visit: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/fm.html. Of course, if you don't feel like doing it yourself, a web designer could take care of it for you in less than an hour. It's up to you how you want to store, manage, and use this information. Many people simply store their opt-in lists in a spreadsheet or text file, but there are also some great programs available to help you manage this information more easily. Once you've started collecting opt-ins, there are a few things you will need to know to effectively manage them... and guarantee the highest possible response from any mailout you send. I've boiled them down to four simple strategies that will have you managing your lists like a pro in no time! List Management Tip #1: Subscribes And Unsubscribes One of the most important things you can do to keep your profits maximized -- and your headaches minimized -- is to stay on top of your subscribe and unsubscribe requests. For those of you who don't have an automated system for managing subscriptions to your newsletters and promotional mailings, this is especially important. Requests to unsubscribe from your list should always be taken seriously. If someone asks to be removed from your list, and you neglect to do so and continue to send them e-mail, you are spamming them, plain and simple. And nothing will get you in hot water faster than a few spam complaints. You'll find yourself wasting hours of your time explaining yourself to the "spam police," and your ISP might even terminate your account! Of course, it's just as important to ensure that people who ask to be added to your list are subscribed right away, since you never know which one of those subscription requests is going to represent your best customer. If you aren't ensuring that your mailing is being delivered to each and every person who signed up, you're literally throwing money away! If your subscribe and unsubscribe requests aren't handled automatically, you should take care of this right before you send out a mailing. This ensures that your list is as current as possible, and it also means that you don't have to deal with this chore every single day. Just make it a part of your routine before you press "Send" on any mailing. List Management Tip #2: Cleaning Your List Keeping your list clean means more than just removing unsubscribes. Cleaning your list means sifting through the messages that "bounce back" to you after a mailing, and deciding which ones should be removed from your list altogether, and which ones you might want to try mailing again. "Bounced" messages, also referred to as "undeliverable" messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient. Before we go any further, you should know that there are two main categories that bounced messages can fall into: * Fatal Bounces: these represent messages that can never be delivered. Fatal bounces are usually caused by the user typing in an incorrect e-mail address when opting in to your list, or the subscriber no longer using the e-mail address they originally opted-in with. * Non-Fatal Bounces: these are messages that could not be delivered at the time the server tried to deliver them, but may be deliverable at some time in the future. These types of bounces are usually caused by the recipient's mailbox being full, or their mail server being too busy at the time your message was sent. When going through your bounced messages, you'll want to separate them into these two categories. You'll have to go into each returned message and take a look at the reason why it bounced. These messages can be a little tough to decipher, but the two most common reasons for fatal errors are "Unknown User" and "Domain Not Found." When you come across these error messages, the first thing you'll want to do is take a quick look at the e-mail address that the message was being sent to. You'll often find that people will type in an "n" instead of an "m" in the ".com" part of their e-mail address. You can easily correct this by changing the ".con" to ".com". If there is no obvious problem with the subscriber's e-mail address, then this usually means that they entered it incorrectly when they opted-in to your list, or that it's no longer in use. Unfortunately, there's nothing that you can do about these fatal errors, except delete those subscribers from your list. NOTE: just in case you're thinking "Why go through the trouble of removing these addresses from my list if they can't be delivered anyway," think again! If you continue to send e-mail to an address that is invalid, you can get into real trouble. This is one of the methods used to identify spammers, and if you are reported as repeatedly sending messages to "dead" e-mail addresses, you can get into trouble with your ISP. For non-fatal errors -- the most common are "Mailbox Is Full" or "Server Too Busy" -- you'll want to try mailing your promotion to these people again. I suggest waiting a couple of days and then trying to resend your message to all the addresses that returned non-fatal errors in your initial mailout. You'll be surprised by how many get delivered on the second try. List Management Tip #3: Creating Exclude Lists Are you subscribed to your competitors' mailing lists? You should be! A big part of keeping tabs on your competitors is monitoring what products or services they are actively promoting and how much they are selling them for. If your competitors are smart, I can just about guarantee that they are subscribed to YOUR mailing list, too. So in order to stay one step ahead of your competitors, you might want to think about excluding them from certain mailouts. Let's suppose that you are planning a big promotion that is going to offer a product at a price 30% below what your competition is offering it for. Wouldn't you want to keep that information out of your competitors' hands as long as possible? Just about the ONLY step you can take to stay ahead of your competition in this respect is to go through your opt-in list and exclude addresses that you KNOW belong to your competition. If your competitor runs a site called joes-widget-world.com, then you can be sure that the e-mail address susan@joes-widget-world.com belongs to someone who's keeping tabs on you. Simply exclude that e-mail address from your promotion, and your competitors won't know what hit them... until well after you've dominated the market! List Management Tip #4: Storing And Managing Subscriber Data As your list grows, it will become more and more important to ensure that you are storing your subscriber data in a format that is convenient and easy to work with. The biggest problem that people run into when they start trying to manage and optimize their opt-in lists is that they quickly find themselves with dozens of small lists instead of one big one. List "A" might contain people who have purchased your product in the past 3 months, List "D" might contain subscribers who have downloaded your free eBook but have never bought your product, List "W" might contain people who have bought five or more of your products, and so on. While this means that you are able to easily target different segments of your customer and subscriber base, it also means that you could spend hours and hours preparing your various lists for each promotion you send. Those of you who are doing this already know how frustrating and time-consuming these kinds of tasks can be. And once you have your lists ready, importing them into whatever e-mail application you're using can be even more maddening! Luckily, there are some pretty powerful products out there designed to help e-mail marketers develop, manage, and segment their lists easily, from one user-friendly interface. The right software can save you literally hundreds of hours of frustration. Keep your eyes open, because we're going to be talking about some of these products in future issues. Final Thoughts: I don't know about you, but what I like best about having an effective list-management system in place is that I no longer have to worry about my lists. Once you get your lists under control, you'll be amazed at how much extra time you'll suddenly have on your hands. And if you're like me, you'll want to spend it working on other, more profitable aspects of your business. Using the right technology can help you put together an e-mail promotion that will dramatically boost your bottom line. Using advanced targeting and personalization strategies, I think you'll be surprised at how easy it is to send out e-mails that will have people buying like crazy! So please take you time and discover how the newest edition of Mailloop can make your Net live a LOT better!
--> How to drive targeted cash-in-hand prospects to any of your web sites at no cost! --> How To Save Time, Automate Follow Ups, and Increase Your Internet Profits... --> XSite Pro -- Double Your Website Income in Less than 1 Hour!
Dear friend, I would love to hear what you think of this issue of The Internet Marketing Profits™ newsletter. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you'd like to share with me, please send those, too -- just email me right away! And don't forget to check out the previous issues at the Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter Archive. "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Valeriu S. Popescu, Editor and Publisher ^ back to the top of the Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter, issue 66 DID YOU LIKE THIS ISSUE? Please forward it to your friends, co-workers, colleagues and anyone else that you think would like it. Thank you for your continued support! DISCLAIMER: I urge you to exercise due diligence in responding to any advertisement or article posted here or in any other future issue. I do not give business or professional advice in this newsletter and therefore cannot be held responsible for results you get from responding to ads or articles in this newsletter. I urge you to exercise due diligence in all of your online dealings. |