Expert Quotes
Here’s just a handful of internet marketing experts and what they have to say
about the importance of having a great opt-in offer on your site.
Focus on In-House Lists
It may be bad news for list rental firms, but while campaigns to rented lists are reportedly producing unsatisfactory results, both off-line and online mailings to in-house files are working well. This is particularly welcome news if you’ve been compiling a prospect and customer database. If not, now is the time to add a registration form to the main page of your Web site to create your own opt-in e-mail list and bring your in-house mailing list up-to-date for campaigns.
Kim T. Gordon
Entrepreneur Magazine
Article: 3 Marketing Tactics to Use Right Now
“The critical success factor is simple–know your customers and get their e-mail addresses. If you’re doing business online today, then you’re capturing information about your customers with each order. Even if you’re not taking orders online, you can collect the e-mail addresses of prospective customers who visit your site by allowing them to opt-in for more information or to sign up for gift or event reminders. You can collect personal interest information from these visitors as well.
With little investment in time and budget, you’ll discover that e-mail marketing will help you build loyal customers that bring you big profits via repeat business and word-of-mouth. The playing field is level. Isn’t it time to get in the game?”
Gail F. Goodman
Entrepreneur Magazine
How To Turn Your Most Important
Asset: The Opt-In Offer
Written By Alfred Loo
Online email marketing communications play a low-profile but nonetheless pivotal and steering role in the Internet marketing world.
Principal among these communications is the opt-in offer, the carefully designed and crafted of which is often far more important than your website.
It’s what you do after people visit your website that really counts.
Irresistible follow-up emails are yet another essential tool of online marketing communications, because effective autoresponder e-mails following up frequently determines the difference between the mediocre and the outstanding sales.
Converting web visitors into buying customers is rarely done during their site visit, but by having an “mouth-watering” opt-in offer and following up with e-mail messages designed to build good relationship and rapport with your prospects conversion rates of 30 percent or more can be achieved.
So, capturing contact information is fundamental to your success of your online business. As web marketer, your primary goal, at the very least, should be capturing your web visitors’ email addresses.
Without this data, you have, in effect, wasted all your time and effort it took to get them to your website in the first place. Ultimately, you cannot overemphasize that constructing your opt-in offer is of paramount importance than that of designing the offer for your primary products.
It is apparent, therefore, that you need to make your opt-in offer as compelling and killing as possible in order to persuade visitors to give you this personal information.
Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Turn-Your-Most-Important-Asset:-The-Opt-In-Offer&id=550906
The True Importance of Building a List
We have heard the saying “Money is in the list” many times before, but for some reason a lot of affiliates and marketers still don’t realize how important building a list actually is.
I am not sure why affiliate marketers forget this crucial business building step, but list building should be your highest priority if you sell anything online. I don’t care if you are promoting a “how to build an igloo” ebook. Build that list of subscribers, or your business will not last very long.
For example, Google banned thousands of affiliates a while back from their Adwords program and those who weren’t capturing names and email addresses got left out in the cold. Their income dropped almost instantly and there was nothing they could do about it.
The fact is that it should be your highest priority to build a list of raving fans that read your emails. Sure you can make money online by simply driving traffic straight to an offer, but as soon as your traffic source stops producing clicks or your ads get disapproved, you are finished.
Let me give you some of the biggest key benefits of owning a highly responsive list of subscribers.
1. Traffic on Tap – Anytime you want to test out an offer or make some quick cash, you can simply load up your auto-responder with a promo email and click “send”. When that email hits people’s inboxes they click on your link and go to the offer. If you did a great job at preselling, they are going to buy whatever it is you recommended. What’s really important is that you no longer depend on other traffic sources for income. You basically own a traffic source that you can always count on without paying a dime for clicks it generates.
2. Joint Ventures – This is a huge benefit that most affiliate marketers forget about. If you have a highly responsive list, you can leverage it to sell your own products and services. When you promote someone else’s product and do a decent volume of sales for them, 98% of the time they will offer a reciprocal mailing for you. There is a reason why marketers with big lists make most of the money in the internet marketing niche.
3. Knowing What Your Market Wants – Use your list to find out what they want and sell it to them. You can use a service like SurveyMonkey.com and create a simple survey to send out to your subscribers. Ask them what they want or what they need help with. Then create a product or service based on the data you collected. Why guess what they want, when you can simply ask them and remove the risk of poor conversions completely from the picture?
4. Leverage – Don’t ever underestimate people on your list. Some of them might have successful businesses and could become your super affiliates. Imagine announcing your affiliate program to thousands of people with a single click of a button. You could literally overnight get your site flooded with traffic by leveraging your subscribers’ efforts. 1000 affiliates driving 100 clicks per day is better than one joint venture partner, who can send a limited number of clicks.
5. Be Viewed As An Expert – When you have a big audience, your opinion and message, which you send out matters. You could have a big impact on your niche market if you have the power to reach thousands of people with a click of a button. A lot of marketers do not know how to position themselves as experts. Build a list and eventually you won’t have to worry about that because of the instant social proof you can generate.
I think the above 5 key benefits make things very clear and why it’s absolutely crucial to put 100% of your effort into growing your subscriber base. I hope you now realize how powerful this actually is, and how it can take your business to a new level very quickly.
Your ultimate goal is to capture the attention of your market and have it at your disposal any time you want them to take your desired action.
Article Source: http://www.canimakebigmoneyonline.com/index.php/20110601-the-true-importance-of-building-a-list/
Beef Up Your Opt-In Email List
Written by Chris Audet
Sun West Media Group
If there is one piece of advice I would give to every business operating on the Web today, it would be this:
You MUST collect the opt-in information of visitors to your web site!
Why? Because if you’re not constantly building your opt-in email list, you’re letting MOST of your sales opportunities slip right through your fingers! I can’t say it often enough!
Studies have shown that it takes an average of FOUR TO SEVEN points of contact to make a sale – and you won’t make it to the second point of contact if you don’t have a way to reach your visitors after they’ve left your site.
Think about how many web sites you visit in an hour of surfing the Internet – do you remember the salescopy and products from each of those sites? Could you find a particular site again if you wanted to re-check their information? Even if you Googled it, there’s no guarantee that exact URL would show up in your keyword results.
In most cases, visitors come to your site, they look around, then they leave, and they’re gone forever.
But simply by collecting their first name, last name, and email address, you can stay firmly on their radar and expose them to your products time and time again – all at nearly no cost to you! These people are your opt-ins, and an opt-in email list is the very foundation of any online business.
That’s why it’s amazing to me that many people don’t take advantage of opt-in email marketing.
Especially when statistics from PostFuture back up exactly what I’m saying:
82% of online buyers have made at least one purchase in response to an email promotion
67% of users open at least 60% of opt-in emails they receive
32% have made an immediate online purchase in response to an email!
59% have gone on to redeem an email coupon in an online OR offline store
People pay close attention to their email, and more and more people are buying online every year!
But consumers know that their personal information is gold, and they won’t give it to you unless you give them something they want in return. If you provide your visitors with a targeted, valuable opt-in offer, your opt-in email list will grow – and so will your revenues.
Article Source: http://www.sunwestmediagroup.com/component/k2/item/1-beef-up-your-opt-in-email-list