How To Start Your Own NewsletterYour Road Plan To Email Marketing Success |
9. Content ManagementContent Management Most ezine software offer tools to manage the content of your Ezine. This includes content formatting functionality enabling content to be published with different kinds of pre defined templates, and formats such as text, HTML or a combination of both. This is an extremely handy tool. Personalization This tool allows ezines to be personalized for every reader. For instance, before sending an ezine to a particular reader this tool would fetch the name of the reader from the database and address the ezine directly to that reader. Thus, instead of a “Dear Member …” you could have a “Dear John” or “Dear Samantha”. We discussed earlier the importance of personalizing newsletters. This tool does just that. Moreover, you could also personalize on the basis of interests, age groups and so on. For instance, you could have pre defined content from the same ezine for teenagers and different pre defined content for senior citizens. Scheduling and Administration Scheduling allows you to automatically send out the ezines at a particular frequency. You could automate when and how many times to send the ezine within every month. Apart from this a content management system would also empower you with all kinds of administrative tools such as managing the look and feel of the ezine to managing subscriber lists and the works. Managing Subscriptions Ezine software include tools that enable creating and managing subscriber lists for each ezine, automatically handling subscription as well as un-subscription requests, edit and update customer database, handling non existent email addresses, and providing confirmation as well as welcome messages to new subscribers with the help of autoresponders. Moreover, some software also provide tools to break up and analyze customer lists, which can be very useful. Tracking This is probably one of the most important aspects of any ezine software. You should always seek a software or service that provides a very reliable and comprehensive tracking and reporting package. Ensure that detailed statistics about your readers, delivery, and circulation are provided. The more the statistics the better it is for you to analyze the performance of your Ezine campaign. Reliable method of delivery Before hiring a service provider or installing a software test the delivery process to ensure that it is timely and reliable. Do you want your email newsletter to go out at by specific time of the day or be delivered within a certain time period? If so, you'll need to determine the speed at which your email newsletter vendor can send out emails. Most email newsletter software systems are set up so that once you click send, your email is out the door. However, if this is important to you, look for a vendor that allows you to stop mailings in mid-stream to prevent any errors. Other features to look for Apart from the above mentioned, there are a few other things to keep in mind before you decide on a vendor. For instance, does the vendor implement very strict policies against spam? Do they have any mechanism to solve spam complaints? I would highly recommend a vendor that prevents spam as this is one of the most common complaints that readers lodge against ezine publishers. Another thing to look for is the customer support provided by the vendor. You should ideally have a vendor that offers at 24/7 customer support and is quick to respond to any of your queries or problems. Always ask the vendor to provide a demo of how the software works. Do not hire anyone who is not willing to offer a free trial. There may be limitations in the software that could only be seen once you test the software. Lastly, do the required research to compare the prices of different vendors. You would be amazed to see the difference in costs. Besides, ask the vendor for any discount they may provide. It makes sense to negotiate with the email newsletter software vendors as you have significant negotiating leverage given how many competitors and alternatives exist. Read the agreement terms carefully to chalk out any hidden costs and expenses. Landing Page Success Tips Also known as the “name squeeze page” or “lead capture page”, you can build your mailing list by funneling all of your would-be subscribers through the creation of a landing page. Not only do you do the work just once, your traffic driving efforts can be focused onto just one effective method. The following are tips in creating a successful landing page that converts visitors into subscribers on a very huge percentage. Success Tip 1: Offer a freebie in exchange for your visitor’s email address. I very much endorse this method of building your mailing list. You can offer a special report or a sample of your paid product to your visitor in exchange for their details such as name and email address. Success Tip 2: The landing page must be written professionally. When writing your page, treat it as if you are writing a sales letter. While you are not necessarily making a hard sale or try to get someone to buy your product upfront, being able to entice your visitors to give their details to you is just as important as selling. Success Tip 3: Other than your opt-in form and perhaps important disclaimers and terms, there shouldn’t be any other links on your landing page. Success Tip 4: Rub in the benefits of the freebie you are offering more than a mere subscription to your newsletter. You should focus most of the attention of the letter on encouraging your prospective visitor to download your free offer. Later, you gently remind your prospect that he or she has nothing to pay but just merely subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie. As a final reminder and conclusion, in order to build trust, you can include your hand-written signature or a photo of yourself explaining where you are coming from and how you can help your visitor through your free report on offer. Converting Every Visitor into Subscriber If a person visits your website and leaves, chances are that he or she will not come back, especially if there are no compelling reasons to do so. After all, we all behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that we can easily forget where we were 10 web pages ago. But the bottom line is that your visitor may not come back to your website again. If 1,000 visitors visit your website, leave and never come back again, you can imagine the amount of potential revenue lost, simply because they do not come back. You could have converted a fraction of the visitors into your customers. Some may say that creating unique content can keep some of the visitors coming back, but very often, unique content is not the solution. The real, long-term solution lies in converting your visitors into subscribers of your mailing list. Before your visitor leaves your website, you want to convert him or her into your subscriber via a simple opt-in to your mailing list. You do this by asking for your visitor’s name and email address through your opt-in form. And if your visitor signs up to be on your mailing list, you can still follow up with him via email. You can get your subscriber to consider your offer, or endorse another offer to him or her. All in all, you want to convert as many visitors into subscribers as possible and obtain the potential revenue you rightfully deserve – the easy, wise way. Converting Every Web Page into Subscriber Snatching Devices If you own one-page sales letter business models or content-based websites, you should turn every webpage possible into subscriber snatching devices for you. The good news is that not only is this method extra effective, it is just as extra effortless when it comes to applying the concept. Since visitors can come and leave without remembering your website in the future (which is very likely to happen), you can still follow up with your visitors easily by seeking their permission to opt into your mailing list through your web pages – on autopilot! You can create a pop up window to appear after your visitor attempts to close the window or leaves your website, asking for your visitor’s name and email address so that you can follow up with him or her in the near future via subscribing to your mailing list for free. This way, you can convert a big portion of your visitors into subscribers, giving you a chance to follow up with them on other offers you may have in the future. Alternatively, you can insert an opt-in form within the spaces of your web pages. This method is effective, especially if you are afraid of Internet users who have pop up killers installed in their web browsers, set to block any pop up windows. In conclusion, turning every webpage you own into subscriber snatching devices with little effort can be responsible for huge subscriber-pulling results. We discussed the importance of tracking your campaign. Along with tracking your campaign it is equally important that you track your subscribers as well. Acquiring demographic data from existing as well as prospective subscribers can immensely improve the popularity of your ezines. Demographic data can be used to tailor your ezine content to suit a specific audience. This can help improve your content. The most popular ways to gather such data is through a feedback form or a survey on your website. You may also post these forms through Email to existing subscribers. However, most subscribers may deem such information as private. Thus, you should proceed with great care ensuring that you do not ruin the trust of your customers. Here are some guidelines that might help: Clearly mention the purpose of gathering such data Have a strict privacy policy pertaining to subscriber data and convince subscribers that you would be abiding by the policy. Do not collect any data that is not required; collect only the most essential data. Do not provide your subscribers with lengthy surveys. Keep them as short as possible. Provide a strong guarantee that all data collected will be kept safe and confidential, especially from spammers. Do not force anyone to fill up the survey. Do not keep it as a pre-condition to signing up. Keep this process optional. Lastly, automate the feedback process. This will save you a lot of time and effort and would be easier for you to collect data in the future. Testimonials improve credibility of your Ezines. They improve the feeling of trustworthiness amongst prospective subscribers. In fact, testimonials have been known to increase the number of subscribers greatly! The Internet is a very impersonal medium. People trust people! The more you can do to “humanize” your Ezine the more likely potential subscribers will want to do enroll with you. Testimonials “speak” to potential subscribers in an honest, believable way. Write a personalized email to every existing subscriber and request them to provide a review of your Ezines. Ask them what they liked best about your Ezine. Most readers would be happy to assist you. Here are some tips on how to approach subscribers for testimonials. Give a sample issue of the Ezine to a group of users in your target market. Ask them: - if they found it useful - how they would improve the product. Give a sample issue to an industry expert - Someone with a complete knowledge of your field is well suited to judge how your Ezine works. Always get permission to use the testimonial. Have them sign a release form granting their permission to publish their testimonial in the Ezine as well as the website. Fully identify the person while quoting the testimonial. This includes the full name, occupation, and company name. You could also include city and age if you have permission from the person to do so. Testimonials can be used on a testimonials page on your website; they could be scattered throughout your website; they could be used in marketing and sales letters; in autoresponder messages; and in brochures. The words of a satisfied reader are powerful tools for building trust, promoting your reputation, and increasing subscribers. 3. Turning A Profit With Your eZine Information is freely available on the Internet. Do paid ezines work? The answer is in most cases they don’t. The magic word here is most cases – there are exceptions where paid ezines have been highly successful. If you are just starting out with your ezine forget about asking your subscribers to pay for your ezine. Paid ezines can only work when you have established a name for yourself. Besides, if your main aim behind running an ezine campaign is to promote your other products avoid having paid subscriptions. You may charge for ezines if you have been able to regularly publish them for a period of time constantly increasing your subscriber base. What can make the transition from free to paid ezine successful is out of the ordinary content. Your ezine should have extremely unique and informative content that would otherwise not be available freely on the Internet. People are only going to pay if they find that your ezines actually help readers. For instance you could have an ezine about Search Engine Optimization wherein you provide tips and guidelines that are proven and not available elsewhere. Another aspect of paid ezines is the ability to accept credit card payments. There is no use having a paid ezine and only accepting the payment in terms of checks and money orders. Having a payment gateway such as ClickBank or PayPal would certainly help. Paid ezines may work when administered and marketed in the right way. The key is to convince your readers that they would be getting their money’s worth by paying for your ezine. As soon as you start charging for your Ezine, your readers will start expecting a higher standard from your Ezine as well as a good value for their money. You need a well-thought out and balanced strategy so that you can convince your readers that they are definitely getting valuable information. You also need to provide unique and exclusive information that your competitors do not provide. If you churn out the same type of information in your fee-based Ezine, which is also provided by another free Ezine or website, your fee-based model will never work. Here are a few strategies you need to keep in mind if you want your fee-based model to be successful: You need to make sure that you provide exclusive content for your fee-based Ezine. The information that you provide must be of great value and must intrigue your readers. Your readers must be compelled to actually pay and obtain the content. Such information can be exclusive industry news, insider information on the stock market, top-class tips, question-answer sets for competitive exams like GMAT, SAT, etc., high-quality reliable medical information and so on. Whenever you provide targeted information for such a niche market, make sure that you hire an expert to write the articles or provide information so that you can attach credibility to your Ezine. Just like regular print newsletters, you need to employ direct response marketing to market your Ezine effectively. This means that you have to spend all your advertising money on media where you can measure the response that you receive. You can use tele-marketing, Internet marketing, paper/electronic media and so on to advertise your Ezine. Use these strategies on trial and error methods to find out the right combination of marketing for your Ezine that can help you build your subscribers’ base for paid ezines. When you try and market your paid Ezine just as an informative newsletter, it does not really attract the attention of your readers. Not many people want to spend money on just ‘information’. But when you guise your Ezine as a part of the full package, then it clicks. For example, you can offer your readers premium package where in with a few dollars every month, they can get the entire Ezine, special reports and the opportunity to ask questions to the experts. This will catch their fancy as you are giving them something extra apart from the basic ‘information’. You can divide your Ezine into different sections and access to a particular section such as archives or back issues, articles written by experts can be offered to premium members to choose to pay for that. You can also create different packages or you can have different fees set-up for different reports or articles. It may very well be that your paid Ezine will probably not get a lot of new customers, but your existing customers will chose to renew or upgrade their membership and hence you can get profits. When you move from publishing free Ezine to creating and selling paid Ezine newsletters, you have to realize that you are changing your entire operational structure. There are so many new additions to your system namely managing paid customers, charging their credit cards, generating invoices and billing issues, refunds and cancellations, providing discounts and incentives, and so on. Make sure that there are no hitches in this part of your operation as you are dealing with people’s money and things can get dirty if you make even one mistake. For instance, you would have to set up an extremely safe and secure payment system. You will need to ensure that you integrate this with your existing system so that you can ensure effective customer service. All the technical and creative aspects should work in harmony with each other. It will be hard for your subscribers to pay for your Ezine if you have been publishing a free Ezine all along. The obvious question in their minds would be “What is so special about your Ezine now that you are charging a fee to read it, and what was it lacking in the past?”. You need to come up with a plan to make this transition as smooth as possible for you as well as for your readers. Your readers should not unsubscribe from your Ezine but instead continue as paid members. It is not going to be easy to convince existing as well as new readers to enroll for a paid subscription. That said, it is not impossible as well to do so. Here are some tips that might help you convert free subscribers to paid subscribers.
|
Browse Site3. Invite Guest Writers to Write in Your Ezine 5. Free Resources on Writing Skills 6. Write Attractive Descriptions 8. Free Hosts – a Definite No No 10. Suggest the Change Subtly to Your Readers 11. Creating a Comprehensive Online Media Kit 13. Always Look for Opt in Ezines 14. Auto Responder Improvements |
||
| copyright - 2006 - kenmathie.com | |||