Despite the scourge of spam and viruses that have hit e-mail users in the past years, e-mail remains the killer application. E-mail newsletters are undeniably powerful tools to build audience and encourage real relationships between you and your site visitors and customers.
The key to avoiding guerrilla tactics in e-mail advertising is to make all e-mail newsletters optional. You will have people opt in mostly via your Web site, which means they have to get to your Web site in the first place. Once visitors do opt in, you can begin building a personal mailing list, which in turn encourages return visits to your site.
There are numerous directories to which you can post announcements about new e-mail lists. These directories can be helpful because they provide a means of getting interested readers and promoters together.
Some of the important factors to consider when initiating opt-in e-mail newsletters are as follows:
- What are the specific results you want from the e-mail? (Sales? More eyes on your site?)
- Do you want to offer HTML e-mail? Many e-mail experts say that HTML e-mail is the only way to go, but HTML e-mail may be problematic or undesirable for certain audiences.
- What kind of content are you going to offer (such as articles, reviews of products, tips and tricks, interviews, and polls)?
- How long will your newsletter be? Most e-mail experts say that keeping content short and to the point wins the day.
- How often will you send the newsletter out to subscribers?
Most e-mail newsletter services offer reasonably priced assistance for managing HTML versus text e-mail, tracking e-mail responses, statistics, demographics, and additional helpful tools that you can use to increase your awareness of how well your e-mail campaign is working.
Experts do suggest that you spend time creating a plan to start e-mail newsletters, and also build in a way to assess how effective your plan is working. This way, you can adjust to the needs of your audience as time goes on.
Generally speaking, you should send your e-mails during the week. Some studies suggest that most people open newsletters between Tuesday and Thursday. While weekends are often considered bad times to send newsletters, it really will depend upon your audience. If you are selling sports products, movies, or other recreational products, the weekend might be the perfect time to grab some attention.
I have an opt-in newsletter on my site, and I have several thousand people on that list. One of the things I do regularly is to focus special promotions and giveaways to those readers as a means of rewarding their ongoing loyalty and interest in my work. Figure below shows a significant spike in site visits after a newsletter campaign.
Consider Affiliate Programs
If it’s appropriate for your site, you may wish to consider affiliate programs. Amazon. com offers the most famous of these programs. Here’s how affiliate programs work. You create coded links on your own site of recommended products, sign up for the affiliate program to get the various coded links you’llneed, and then you will receive a percentage of money from any affiliate sales.
The better you manage to drive people to purchase products via your affiliate program, the more money you can make.
For example, for computer book authors, affiliate programs can make a lot of sense. All books I’ve written can be linked from my site to an affiliate such as Amazon. Therefore, not only do I get the royalties I’mdue from each sale, but I also make a percentage, boosting my earnings a little bit. There are pros and cons to affiliate programs, just as with anything. I used to manage an affiliate program on my Web site, but eventually took it off because I was getting far too many queries personally. Amazon is better equipped to provide wide-scale customer service and keep information up-to-date than I am without a concentrated effort. For me, the cons outweighed the pros.
Table below shows some of the pros and cons to consider before jumping into an affiliate program.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| You have very little overhead in day-to-day management of business logistics and inventory | No hands-on control over product quality, shipping and delivery, and other logistics, yet you may be held accountable by your clients anyway |
| You can focus on one thing—marketing your product via your Web site | Affiliates do not provide any marketing assistance for the most part. You have to sell the goods. So, unless you are a born salesperson or have a good one on your team, an affiliate program might not be in your best interest |
| You’ll learn a lot about selling products online! This makes affiliate programs a good way for many folks to get started in e-commerce | You may become so locked in to the learning curve involved with managing your program and Web site that you neglect other important aspects of Web site and product promotion |
| You make money | You could make more money in some instances by not relying on an affiliate, who may take as much of 50 percent of your gross sales |
| You have autonomy to design and develop your site and display your products as you see fit. If you do this very well, you may end up with great leverage against your competitors | You are relying on another company to pay you. Payments can take time, rates can change, and you don’t have much recourse except to stop the affiliate program |
The most important issue is to be sure the affiliate program with which you are working is on the up-and-up. Check with other people who have used the service, and you can even find out where the company resides, whether it is licensed, and so on.
You may be able to check with the local consumer office or chamber of commerce to see if any complaints have been lodged against the company.
