If you have a website that signs up people with a newsletter, or a forum full of members, etc. what is the best way to market to them in the email? I got signed up with some mailing newsletter from some directory/search engine (they force you to when you list your site) and now i recieve 18 copies of the same newsletter (1 for every site i submitted) every 2-3 days. They're always layed out the same and always full of ads for affiliate programs and such... I always just delete them and never bother, but could these guys actually be making good money from it? I know techniques would differ with your target audience.. but if anyone has any success stories with this .. please share I have a forum with about 1k members thats constantly growing and I try to send out an email to everyone once a month with any good updates to the site or interesting things going on in the forum, hopefully to get some people who signed up and haven't visited in a while back on the site. I haven't noticed much response , but can't really tell how successfull it b/c the site gets enough traffic that ~100 visitors doesn't make a difference on the stats...
Hi Yo-yo! You would be surprised to know that a lot of online businessmen garner most of their sales through their mailing lists. For many Internet marketers, mailing lists are prime commodities. Most of the big guns would only enter a joint venture with you if you could show a large database of subscribers. Your question, if I'm not mistaken, is how businesses with mailing lists can earn money from the same? Well, as you personally have come to experience, Sir, blatant advertising isn't the way to go. A mailing list is also called a follow-up list. This is because with a mailing list, you would be able to capture visitors instead of allowing them to walk away, and you could hope that though those visitors weren't interested in purchasing your offer the first time around, they might be interested with future offers. The trick lies in warming them up for a future sale. There are many tried and tested ways by which you could do this. First, you could show them a little generosity, and they might show you some of theirs in return. Give them a free gift. Like a downloadable eBook or a special report or an email account. Anything. Do this a couple of times. Then make your first offer. Second, you could try subtle advertising. Give them something informative. Content is not only king in search engine optimization, it likewise rules in follow-ups. Deliver something they would want to read, and cleverly insert your recommendations within the content, without making it read like a sales pitch. Third, you could just deliver the offer upfront. But make sure that it is something that is special for them... something they should dare not miss. A humongous discount perhaps, that is not available anywhere else? Or an offer loaded with a gazillion bonuses, maybe? Or a package they would not be able to resist? In between offers, you could give them some freebies. Or you could even conduct some contests, like for example, the first three people who will send in the answer to a particular question would win some gifts. This would allow you to discover how many of your subscribers actually read your feeds. And this would also make your subscribers read your future emails, as they wouldn't want to miss out on another special. Bottomline: a mailing list is a very powerful tool, but it remains a tool. If the person who wields it doesn't have a clue on what to do with the same, it'll just be useless. Good luck! John