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Email Marketing

Converting enquiries and supporting members

Email Marketing can help you convert enquiries, build community and support your members.

You can incease your service and reputation by applying proven email marketing techniques. Email marketing in support of a targetted web site is particularly good at:

• Building relationships, before and after the sale
• Generating high value back-end sales and repeat business
• Building your reputation, worldwide.

Research shows that prospective customers or members are more likely take action following six or seven points of contact, which can be email, phone or whatever. It takes time to build up trust.

Building Your List

The objective is to establish and build up your own "Opt-in list", where list members are highly targetted and have actively requested or agreed to join the list. Better still is "double opt-in", where lists members have to actively confirm their joining request prior to being accepted.

The best guide I have found is The Opt In Strategy ebook, by Ian Herculson. It covers how to build your own highly responsive Opt-In Email List from scratch, and is available for free if you join our email newsletter list:

Managing Your List

List management can be quite simple at first, but as numbers grow you need a list server or service to handle the administration new members and unsubscribes:

Email CLients

For a small list you could use the advanced features of an email client such as The Bat! This is the hard way.

List Servers

There are several server based programmes such as Listserve and Mailman that have come from the Unix or Linux culture, and were originally command line based. They now provide a web interface, of sorts, and will support very large lists. But they generally lack the flexible autoresponder sequences and list management features that are required for serious email marketing.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are one of the most widely used promotional tools on the Internet. They can provide improved service, without manual intervention, and significantly increase conversion rates.

The most popular products seem to be:

1. Aweber, host based autoresponder service
2. Get Response, runs on your own server.

For further information and other products please see:

1. Autoresponder Basics - article by Shelley Lowery.
2. Autoresponder Magic - commercial eBook with hundreds of sample scripts from the industry leaders.
3. The Opt In Strategy, free ebooks as above.

Ezine newsletter content

The options include:

1. Write your own
2. Other people's free articles, such as the articles below
3. But see eContent Matters for good reasons to write your own or use their royalty free content. There is a simliar service by Charlie Page of The Directory of Ezines

Articles now on this site

The 'Secret' of a Successful Free Ezine, by Terry Dean
How to Market with Ezine Articles, by Charlie Page
How to Add 1,000 Subscribers To Your Own Ezine Every Month, by Terry Dean
Seven Ways to Add 100 or More Subscribers To Your Opt-In List Daily, by Terry Dean

Summary

For a comprehensive commercial guide see Million Dollar eMails - the classic commercial eBook by Yanik Silver that says it all.

For further information and related consultancy services available from Ellipse Services Limited please Contact Us

Email Marketing

Converting enquiries, building community and supporting members

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