How To Get Your Subscribers to beg For More
July 19th 2008
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Just as an experiment, I subscribed to ten different opt-in e-mail marketing lists to see which ones are effective.
Many websites and online businesses have resorted to sending promotional materials to people who have subscribed to them in an effort to boost their sales or traffic. Opt-in email marketing sends newsletters, catalogues, updates and many more promotional materials to website visitors who have agreed to be updated whether monthly, weekly or quarterly.
If a promotional material grabs the interest of the receivers, they will go to the site to learn more or to purchase outright.
For the website operators or owners this is a chance to remind their list of their existence and showcase their products.
With the numerous sites on the internet that offer the same products or services in one way another the competition can get pretty tight and it is easy to be forgotten.
Back to my experiment. I tried to find out which opt-in marketing strategies compelled a person into begging for more. I noticed many different tactics. Some of them were so effective that I just couldn’t wait to go to their site and learn more, the more persuasive ones even got me halfway to reaching for my credit card before I realized this was only an experiment!
Many companies and sites present their promotional materials in a wide variety of concepts.
Each have their own distinctive style and designs, but more than the outline and the presentation, the content and the articles are what keeps the attention of your potential customer locked on to your opt-in marketing medium. Creativity is the key. Here’s my findings:
Keep your promotional materials light, creative and original. Many people are stressed out as it is. Getting a stuffy business proposal rather than a lighthearted e-mail may just agitate them more.
A warm friendly content or banter is always more welcomed than a serious business proposal.
While you do want your customers to take you and your products and services seriously, you also want to show them that you know how to have fun.
Make your materials eye catching and grabbing so they wo’nt be able to take their eyes off them.
Have good content even if it means investing in an experienced and professional copywriter to write them for you.
Build trust between you and your customers and stablish your credibility in what you write. It must be informative but not stuffy. Let go of the professional jargons and “talk” to your recipients.
Outline the benefits of your product and services and why people need what you are offering. But do not be too demanding and too persuasive. your content should entertain your prospects as well as lead them to buying from you.
If you’ve ever read an article about eBay you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make - it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.
The fact that these people exist gives you some idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay - they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they’ve bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people - they don’t need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.
Even if you don’t want to quit your job and really go for it you can still use eBay to make a significant second income. You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.
What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no job interview and no commuting involved - if you can post things, you can do it.
Yes, you read that correctly: thirteen years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, a French borne Iranian/American.
1. E-mail: It was first but it is still around and still used. It is, however, getting a little harder to use as more and more government restrictions are placed on it. Still… it does work.
2. Newsletters: This is an extension of e-mail but it a very effective tool. If you include enough timely and valuable information, a good newsletter can drive up the number of visits to your website.
4. Chat Rooms: A chat room on your website can and does encourage interaction among your customers and that can’t be a bad thing. Also, you can use the chat room to schedule special events like having an expert available to answer questions on a given day at a given time.
6. Video Clips: Including cool video clips on your website will keep the interest up and increase traffic.
