I would say that building and maintaining your Mailing List is critical when it comes to long lasting success.
Why do you need a Mailing List?
- Market Research shows that it costs your business 5x more to get a new customer then it does to sell to a previous customer.
- Most website visitors do not order on the first visit. If we can capture their email address, we can bring them back to us!
- Too busy
- Not enough money to purchase now
- Still doing research
- Not comfortable with your business yet
- If we can capture their email address, we can bring them back to us!
- We can build brand awareness
- We can build credibility and trust
Using Autoresponders To Increase Sales
When it comes to your online store, you want to grab as many emails as possible. If you had your way, every single person that enters your website would add their name to your mailing list. How do you do that? Offer them something for signing up! Free advice, free tips, free e-books, a monthly give away, and/or offer them a discount just for signing up. Tell them that when they sign up, they will immediately get a coupon for 5% off or free shipping. Do whatever it takes to get them to give you that email address. You have worked so hard to get them to your website. Now capture their information so we can continue to bring them back!
What program do you use?
Yahoo! has a very simple and easy way to collect addresses within your store editor for free. The problem…that is all it does. It will not send them the coupon automatically. It will not even send them an email. You will have to do everything manually. Now if you are just starting and looking to save some money, this might be the best choice but I think you will find the option below will suit your needs and your budget.
But my absolute favorite program is Aweber. You get unlimited auto responders, unlimited follow up messages, unlimited campaigns, wonderful templates to use for sending out your emails, ad tracking, and a lot more. They have a really great feature that allows you to do A/B testing. This allows you to really figure out what works and what doesn’t. Most importantly you get up to 10,000 subscribers at one low rate. This is the one that we use and it is less than $20.00 a month.
We use to use Constant Contact. They had really great templates to use for sending out emails. BUT they charge per subscriber. 10,000 subscribers with them cost $150.00 a month and you do not get any auto responders. IKES! Even having 500 or more people on your list will cost you $10.00 more a month then Aweber
Yahoo! partners with Got Marketing Campaigner. They also charge per subscriber and 10,000 subscribers will cost you $75.00 a month. There minimum payment is $25.00 a month which again will cost you more than Aweber
Putting the Newsletter Form On Your Website
If you are using one of the services listed above, they will give you a copy of the code to paste into your website.
If you want to send the email addresses to the Mailing List area of your
Yahoo! Store so that you can export them into excel you can use Yahoo's code.
Directions can be found in
Yahoo Help. If you use this method, you will have to send your updates
through your own email program. This will become difficult to do after you
collect a certain amount of emails. Again, I would recommend one of the choice's
above.
Where do you put the newsletter form?
Remember you want your customers to see this immediately. My recommendation would be the top right column if you have one in your store. Otherwise I would recommend having it in the top of your left navigation bar or in your header.
If you have a 3.0 Yahoo! Store you can click variables and add the code to the variable called Html-above-left-nav
Can you do this for me?
You can purchase our Newsletter Sign-Up Service. We can input code from any service or use the basic form provided by Yahoo!
http://www.1choice4yourstore.com/nesi.html
