E-Mail Marketing

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How Do I Get Visitors to My Site? Part 4. Traffic from Former Visitors Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing Today - Oct 28, 2008

Get more traffic! Yes, but what about the people who have already visited your site and liked what they saw? They are the very best prospects you can imagine for your products or services. How do you bring them back? Develop an e-mail newsletter or blog.

Insulate your Website against Energy Loss

You've spent lots of time and money for search engine optimization and advertising to get people to your website. But if your conversion rate is only 2% to 3%, like energy being lost from an house without insulation, you're wasting 97% to 98% of your marketing efforts.

You can turn this around using a strategy adopted by tens of thousands of successful online businesses -- develop an e-mail newsletter of value and then make it a high priority to get site visitors to sign up. Done right, you should be able to get at least 10% to 20% of your visitors to subscribe. Multiply that over a year and you'll have a substantial e-mail list of highly targeted prospects.

Develop an E-mail Newsletter of Value

People won't sign up to get more e-mail unless they believe they will receive value from doing so. So what value could you offer site visitors in the form of an e-mail newsletter? It will vary from one business to another, but consider:

• Helpful how-to articles

• Industry updates and analyses

• Links to new trends and important news articles

• Product reviews

• Special prices on Internet-only sales

Pause right now and write down several ideas. Once you've determined how to offer value, you have two primary challenges.

Get Visitors to Sign Up

The first challenge is to get site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. You can get a subscription form from your e-mail marketing service such as iContact or Constant Contact. To get sign-ups:

• Put the sign-up form in a high-visibility spot on every page of your site.

• Next to each sign-up form explain how a person will benefit from this newsletter.

• Provide incentives for signing up, such as a free whitepaper or a coupon.

Build Trust Regularly

The second challenge is to provide great content on a regular basis. Too often a small business will start an e-mail newsletter or blog that bogs down after the first month or so. Indeed, writing a regular e-mail newsletter is a commitment of at least half a day each issue. Look at the time as a marketing expense that will bring back your best customers to your site again and again. I recommend that you:

• Set a regular schedule of at least once each month.

• Plan ahead with an editorial calendar that lists topics you'll cover for the next 6 to 12 months, one topic per issue.

• Assign a person the task of writing and publishing this newsletter and give him or her time to complete it.

• Hire a local writer to take this project, if you don't have the resources in-house.

• Consider using free articles available online at article sites, such as EzineArticles.com.

• Feature and link to one of your products and services in each issue to generate repeat traffic to your site.

This e-mail newsletter strategy is not a short-term fix for traffic, but a long-term, relationship-building approach designed to develop a customer base that values your services and will buy from you regularly in the future.

This article is part of a 4-part series: (1) Traffic from Search Engines, (2) Traffic from Paid Search Ads, and (3) Traffic from Other Advertising, (4) Traffic from Former Visitors

Dr. Ralph Wilson is an Internet marketing pioneer, the author of a number of books including Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy (Wiley, 2001). He speaks widely and serves as founding editor of Web Marketing Today. He has a passion for helping small businesses succeed on the Internet.