Shoestring Marketing Strategy 3: E-Mail Marketing to Your House List

Once you get visitors to your website, your next important task is to secure their e-mail address and their permission to e-mail them your newsletter, occasional updates, or new product information. Failure to collect e-mail addresses of site visitors a common and usually fatal error. Getting visitors to your website is hard work. But getting them back again is much easier once you can contact them inexpensively via e-mail.

E-Mail List Servers

You're naive if you think that you can just collect e-mail addresses for use in your Outlook or Eudora e-mail program. To conduct e-mail marketing you need a program that's specifically designed to handle lots of e-mail address -- and provide for constant e-mail address changes, deletions, and obsolescence. Two excellent free programs are Yahoo! Groups (www.yahoogroups.com) and Topica (www.topica.com), which pay for their services by attaching ads to outgoing e-mail messages you send. If you have some money to spend, consider two hosted solutions that start at $25 to $30 per month: KowaBunga Technologies' Opt-In Pro (www.myaffiliateprogram.com/u/a/to.asp?id=3051) and EmailFactory (www.emailfactory.com). If you're publishing a newsletter you can often find a free version of the aging Majordomo program (www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/) provided by your web hosting service. I've been quite happy with SparkList's adaptation of Lyris for my large newsletter lists (http://www.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/af/b.cgi/104/). Another popular solution is PostMaster General (http://www.postmastergeneral.com/?affiliate=rfwilson).

Privacy and Permissions

It's important to understand two related trends that affect a house e-mail list. First is your visitors' understandable desire to maintain privacy of their personal information, so that it is not sold or distributed without their knowledge. Second is the importance of obtaining permission to send e-mails to your site visitors and customers. Single personal e-mails don't need permission. And where you have some kind of marketing relationship with a person you have a kind of implied permission. For example, if someone asked to receive free information from your autoresponder, they have initiated a sort of relationship reciprocal relationship with you. After all, nothing's really free. But using bulk e-mail extraction software to suck e-mail addresses off webpages and bulk-blast them to siteowners is called spamming and can earn you a lot of enemies -- including having your ISP and web hosting services abruptly terminate your accounts. I strongly recommend that you develop and post a privacy policy in accordance with the guidelines at TRUSTe (www.truste.com/bus/pub_privacy.html) and the Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org/library/privacy/). Specifically ask for permission to send your newsletter or product updates. Then don't abuse the implicit or explicit level of permission you have been granted by your site visitors. Your goal is to build a long-term relationship rather than exploit the relationship for immediate sales while alienating potential customers.

Collecting Information

To market effectively to your site visitors you need a minimum of their e-mail addresses, but more information allows you to tailor your e-mailings to their needs. For newsletter subscriptions I ask for a full name so I can personalize newsletters. Just remember that the more information you ask for, the fewer visitors will submit your sign-up form. Only ask for what you absolutely need.

Marketing to Your House List

Finally, e-mail regularly to your growing house list of site visitors and customers -- but not too often, otherwise recipients will feel you're abusing the limited permission they've granted you. But once, perhaps twice a month, is necessary to keep your company in the forefront of your recipients' consciousness. Marketing is best done in conjunction with useful information that interests your visitors. That's why sending a brief newsletter not only informs, but also builds your "brand" and customer trust, as well as providing the context for offers of your products and services. For more information, consider my e-book "A Guide to E-Mail Newsletters" (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/email-newsletters.htm). See? I just marketed a product to you in the context of valuable information. :-)

Remember, you'll probably get only a single chance to capture a website visitor's e-mail address. Don't blow it. But if you can obtain an e-mail address and permission, you'll be able to inexpensively market to that visitor again and again for the life of the e-mail address and make many, many sales that eluded you on a customer's first visit. E-mail marketing to your house list is an essential strategy.