How to Build A Website

This is a follow on from a previous post i posted regarding: Increasing Sales Using Relationship Marketing

Email Updates

Email Updates should play an integral part in automating your business and website as effectively as possible. Thinking of a way to get your users to leave their details may change the way you market your business online forever (and the only way you marketing online altogether). Attracting visitors to your website is great but if you want them to be a customer for life you need to be able to contact them and entice them with great offerings.

E-Shots / Newsletters

An e-shot otherwise known as a Newsletter is a great piece of marketing and ensures you remain in your customers minds at all time throughout the buying cycle, its a great tool to remind them that you’re still there offering products and services.

Newsletters are commonly sent out on a monthly basis and are used to maintain a professional online presence and gets people to expect your regular communications (which is great for brand awarness and online authority).

Many email marketing providers offer great tracking where you can view an emails open rate, click through rate and bounce rate (a bounce is when your email has not been delivered successfully). 

Newsletters can be personalised and even dynamically created, for example you could segment your database list and have a section of your newsletter to change depending on who opens it, e.g. for women you may display perfume and for men display aftershave (thats just a simple example).  

Broadcast Emails

Broadcast Emails allow you to send out the same email to everybody in your list quickly and very easily, furthermore you can personalise them.

You may be launching a new product, have a special offer running or you may want to share industry or company news with your subscribers.

Using Relationship Marketing and an Autoresponder to Deliver Newsletters

Its well known that you need to make several points of contact before your lead will consider converting.

Therefore you may consider using an autoresponder to deliver a series of emails to warm them up into buying from you.

Let say for example you are selling a training course in I.T. and as an incentive you are offering a free 6 week e-course in return for their contact details. After your subscribers have give you their contact details, on day one you may decide to send them a welcome message, following this after 1 week you may want to start them on the free course, then for the next 6 weeks you send them some free content every week, tutorials, top tips, etc, by this point you have built up a good relationship with your readership and you are now in a better position to convert your subscribers.

Your subscribers will be that pleased with the free e-course they have just received they will be a lot more inclined to hand over some money for the real full length course.

Whats great about an autoresponder is your emails / newsletters don’t have to go out on the first day of every month, they can go out whenever you want them to, they can go out at a set period of time after they have subscribed, meaning not everyone will be receiving the same newsletter at the same time.

What is an Autoresponder?

Allot of people think an auto responder is that email you get back when you email somebody who is on holiday “Sorry i am out of the office and i will get back to you upon my return on the 31st January” or very similar messages to this one.

This isn’t what an autoresponder is exactly. Autoresponders as previously mentioned can be an e-course or contain an attachment.

Email courses or general content delivered through an autoresponder are a great way of building and maintaining relationships.

Furthermore an even better thing about using an autoresponder is that it can automate your marketing. Using the example of the e-course, delivering a course over 6 weeks would require 6 separate pieces of content, therefore you simply create these 6 pieces of content, load them into your auto responder and pre-load the interval sends and the best of it is you only have create this content once and once only.

All your website visitors have to do is opt in to your free course or website updates by leaving their name (preferably their first name) and email address. You can then deliver the course to them and even choose to make personal contact a few weeks down the line.

Autoresponder Software

You can read about this in more detail here but the market leading autoresponder software is called AWeber. This is a great piece of autoresponder software which is widely used and has many satisfied customers, this is the perfect tool for automating your marketing and build long term relationships and at such a low cost its a must have tool to generate leads and build relationships.

A small note ‘Email Deliverability’

A big thing to consider here is email deliverability. AWeber has a 99% deliverability rate, this is an outstanding rate and you will not be able to ascertain this kind of deliverability using your own server and you may be at risk of getting a bad reputation as a spammer if you were to do so, so a word of warning there.

Protecting your online presence is extremely important and if you do not do this it could effect your search engine rankings, therefore you need to ensure your emails are coming from a trusted third party.

How Does AWeber Work?

There is nobody who can explain this better than AWeber themselves. AWeber offer a whole host of excellent Video Tutorials. Starting from scratch where you can learn everything for a quick and easy setup for your first email marketing campaign, includig how to set up your list, add messages and publish a sign up form to your website, its so easy and AWeber make it even easier.

Other tutorials include using free templates for email newsletter and how to build an effective follow up again (this is great!).

Ok so where do i start?

The thing i find with email marketing is to get started ASAP. Say you receive X number of visitors per day on your website, why arent you collecting their contact details?. Your potentially chucking away your chance of making a sale.

The most important thing to do is get started as soon as possible, offer some great content, special offers or an e-course and start collecting details now.

Simply sign up to AWeber for a free test drive, get the code on your website (its very easy - its a simple copy and paste job - all of the code is provided for you) and start collecting names and email addresses.

Once you have registered with AWeber (its completely free) they will give you a little bit of code for your form in which your subscriber will enter their details, if you dont feel comfortable with this feel free to drop me an email and i can help you out.

To try this piece of sofware out for free enter your details below and take a free test drive now.

Increase Sales - Use Online Customer Relationship Building & Email Marketing

Did you know that with the effective use of Online Customer Relationship Building, Relationship Marketing and an excellent email marketing tool by the name of AWeber you can increase website visitors (traffic), leads, conversions and most definitely sales by a ridiculously huge amount, learn how you can do this.

What is Online Customer Relationship Marketing?

Online Customer Relationship Marketing as it says on the tin is all about relationships and the effective use of tactics and various methods to develop long term relationships with customers with the intention to turn them into loyal customers.

With the ongoing amount of competition, organizations must demonstrate and offer extremely good customer service which gives great value and excellent targeted messages and communications.

However first you have to attract customers before being able to convert them into paying customers, therefore methods and tactics are used to do exactly this. Some organisations offer a whole array of offers, new product promotions and competitive prices. As soon as these leads are captured they then have to be retained, its common for organisations to use methods such as loyalty cards, courtesy calls and many other relationship building tactics.

How does Customer Relationship Marketing work online and how can i get started?

Online Customer Relationship Management tells us that we must have a healthy intelligent database with good data that we can use to use to our advantage to convert leads and retain consumers e.g knowing Mr smith likes to play golf at the weekend and enjoy indulging in a bottle of 1957 red wine of a Saturday evening would be extremely powerful information to some organisations.

Doing this online has never been easier, however asking for too much information at the beginning of a relationship could be asking for that little bit too much, so here we go, this next part of this post will show you how you can start to gather your visitors contact details with ease and convert them into paying customers.

How Can I Generate Leads

You must collect the name (preferably first name - surname is not really required) and email address of a large proportion of your visitors - the reason why I have not mentioned their address or postcode is because most people cant be bothered to fill all of this information in and you can get this later if you need to, to do this you will need to set up a lead capture system, but I will go into this in more detail in a minute.

The idea behind this is when people arrive at your website you encourage them to leave their details, but how can you encourage them do this? There are many ways you can do this but the strongest and most successful way is to offer something for free, now … it doesn’t have to be something outrageous like a free product or something expensive, it doesn’t even have to be anything tangible, it could just be an E-Book or E-Guide which you know will add great value to your visitors, for example i recently listened to a great podcast from someone who set up a website on “How To Cure Acne”, this person simply implemented a lead capture system and to entice visitors into leaving their contact details the webmaster offered a “7 Day Plan to Cure Acne” which was a 7 day plan which provided down to earth advice, tips, product reviews and other useful resources to its readers which was delivered over a 7 day period each day, and the best of it was it was all automated.

However the relationship building didn’t end there, the visitors wouldn’t simply receive 7 days of material and then not a whistle for months, the idea here is to grow the leads and build up a rapore and strong relationship

Using a sophisticated but easy to use web based software the web site owner was able to pre load a list of relationship building emails into what’s called an auto responder, each of the 7 emails only had to be constructed once, then it was loaded into a piece of software and scheduled to go out at a specified time in the day each day for 7 days.. , so let’s say I signed up for the 7 days course on days 1 - 7 i would receive some great tips and advice on how to cure acne .. great …, but then maybe a few days later i would receive another email saying “hi .. i thought you may like this” and then several more emails very much like this one (building up a rapore with me offering sound advice and tips) over the next month, by this stage i would typically begin to look forward to receiving their emails as they are providing great value to me in my struggle to cure acne, this is a great way to build a relationship but to also build authority in their market, in this case curing acne.
To put simply if there is no relationship there is no conversion from leads to buyers. If your site gets great traffic, the key is to build genuine relationships, a byproduct of this is conversion rates and this will increase as your list of subscribers will be responsive.

Give me the software

Now you need to know how you can start to build your list immediately but most importantly build strong relationships. AWeber is the marketing leading automated email follow up and newsletter delivery service in the world (follow up autoresponder).A follow up autoresponder is unique in that, although it can be of great use to almost any business, few people fully understand what it does. If more people knew, then more people would buy.AWeber offers a great solution to building lasting relationships through the use of an automated sequence of personalized messages. Did you know that statistics have shown that it often takes multiple contacts to maximise sales conversion. Creating good quality content in the form of a 7 Day E-Course or writing a comprehensive E-Book followed up with a sequence of relationship building emails (helpful tips, resources, product reviews etc) is one of the easiest ways to obtain paying customers, increase conversion and most importantly increase revenue, and not as a one off, you can automate the whole process, site back, eat, sleep or even take a holiday and your automated lead capture service will be working while you do nothing. Here is the link again, AWeber Offer a free demo, so sign up, give it a try and lean how AWeber can help you achieve excellence. But is it too technical for me? Mastering and I mean mastering all of the tools and functionality doesn’t take too long at all. AWeber have done a great job in ensuring the tool is intuitive and simple to use as possible. It has a good looking interface and the way the tool is designed it makes your job a lot easier to do. You do need to have a technical background or any skills in HTML at all. Ofcourse if you find you are struggling excellent support is a available as is a library of instructional materials, so give AWeber a try.

Why use AWeber Autoresponders

To put simply ever since I began Online Marketing I noticed all of the Online Marketing “gurus” were using it, every mail list I signed up for I received confirmation from AWeber. But I did do a little bit of research around the web and out of the main Autoresponders out there I found it hard to find any negative comments about AWeber.

Furthermore I know a lot of Online Marketers who have been customers with AWeber for a long time so it looks like AWeber have a great retention rate, obviously keeping customers happy, and whats great about using such a popular tool is an online community seems to grow with it, meaning any questions or support you may need there a whole community out there who can not only point you in the right direct but also provide some great tips on how to utilize the tool to its full potential.

What about SPAM and Email Deliverability

Using the wrong tool on you email marketing campaigns, newsletters or broadcasts can have a detrimental impact on your organization and the deliverability of your emails (i.e the amount of emails that actually get through to your subscribers inbox). A lot of inexperienced providers offer services which may seem great but it doesn’t really matter if your email are not getting through as intended.
AWeber have the astonishingly highest percentage of email deliverability meaning AWeber is doing an excellent job to ensure emails are getting through to your subscribers (customers). Email Deliverability is something that should not be ignored.

How Much will it cost me?

AWeber is competitively priced. Obviously if you’re just starting out and have a subscriber list of between 0 – 500 paying only £12 ($18) per month is worth every penny to give your website that professional and more importantly automated edge. Furthermore there is a money back guarantee so if for some reason you don’t like it you have the satisfaction that a refund is available.

Click here to test drive or order an AWeber account today, alternatively sign up for a free test drive below.

Do Your Potential Customers Forget About You?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

 If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process - it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up - don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

Did you know that with the effective use of Relationship Marketing and an excellent email marketing tool by the name of AWeber you can increase website visitors (traffic), leads, conversions and most definitely sales by a ridiculously huge amount, learn how you can do this.

What is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship Marketing as it says on the tin is all about relationships and the effective use of tactics and various methods to develop long term relationships with customers with the intention to turn them into loyal customers.

With the ongoing amount of competition, organizations must demonstrate and offer extremely good customer service which gives great value and excellent targeted messages and communications.

However first you have to attract customers before being able to convert them into paying customers, therefore methods and tactics are used to do exactly this. Some organisations offer a whole array of offers, new product promotions and competitive prices. As soon as these leads are captured they then have to be retained, its common for organisations to use methods such as loyalty cards, courtesy calls and many other relationship building tactics.

How does Relationship Marketing work online and how can i get started?

Customer Relationship Management tells us that we must have a healthy intelligent database with good data that we can use to use to our advantage to convert leads and retain consumers e.g knowing Mr smith likes to play golf at the weekend and enjoy indulging in a bottle of 1957 red wine of a Saturday evening would be extremely powerful information to some organisations.

Doing this online has never been easier, however asking for too much information at the beginning of a relationship could be asking for that little bit too much, so here we go, this next part of this post will show you how you can start to gather your visitors contact details with ease and convert them into paying customers.

How Can I Generate Leads

You must collect the name (preferably first name - surname is not really required) and email address of a large proportion of your visitors - the reason why I have not mentioned their address or postcode is because most people cant be bothered to fill all of this information in and you can get this later if you need to, to do this you will need to set up a lead capture system, but I will go into this in more detail in a minute.

The idea behind this is when people arrive at your website you encourage them to leave their details, but how can you encourage them do this? There are many ways you can do this but the strongest and most successful way is to offer something for free, now … it doesn’t have to be something outrageous like a free product or something expensive, it doesn’t even have to be anything tangible, it could just be an E-Book or E-Guide which you know will add great value to your visitors, for example i recently listened to a great podcast from someone who set up a website on “How To Cure Acne”, this person simply implemented a lead capture system and to entice visitors into leaving their contact details the webmaster offered a “7 Day Plan to Cure Acne” which was a 7 day plan which provided down to earth advice, tips, product reviews and other useful resources to its readers which was delivered over a 7 day period each day, and the best of it was it was all automated.

However the relationship building didn’t end there, the visitors wouldn’t simply receive 7 days of material and then not a whistle for months, the idea here is to grow the leads and build up a rapore and strong relationship

Using a sophisticated but easy to use web based software the web site owner was able to pre load a list of relationship building emails into what’s called an auto responder, each of the 7 emails only had to be constructed once, then it was loaded into a piece of software and scheduled to go out at a specified time in the day each day for 7 days.. , so let’s say I signed up for the 7 days course on days 1 - 7 i would receive some great tips and advice on how to cure acne .. great …, but then maybe a few days later i would receive another email saying “hi .. i thought you may like this” and then several more emails very much like this one (building up a rapore with me offering sound advice and tips) over the next month, by this stage i would typically begin to look forward to receiving their emails as they are providing great value to me in my struggle to cure acne, this is a great way to build a relationship but to also build authority in their market, in this case curing acne.
To put simply if there is no relationship there is no conversion from leads to buyers. If your site gets great traffic, the key is to build genuine relationships, a byproduct of this is conversion rates and this will increase as your list of subscribers will be responsive.

Give me the software

Now you need to know how you can start to build your list immediately but most importantly build strong relationships. AWeber  is the marketing leading automated email follow up and newsletter delivery service in the world (follow up autoresponder).A follow up autoresponder is unique in that, although it can be of great use to almost any business, few people fully understand what it does. If more people knew, then more people would buy.AWeber   offers a great solution to building lasting relationships through the use of an automated sequence of personalized messages. Did you know that statistics have shown that it often takes multiple contacts to maximise sales conversion. Creating good quality content in the form of a 7 Day E-Course or writing a comprehensive E-Book followed up with a sequence of relationship building emails (helpful tips, resources, product reviews etc) is one of the easiest ways to obtain paying customers, increase conversion and most importantly increase revenue, and not as a one off, you can automate the whole process, site back, eat, sleep or even take a holiday and your automated lead capture service will be working while you do nothing. Here is the link again, AWeber  Offer a free demo, so sign up, give it a try and lean how AWeber  can help you achieve excellence. But is it too technical for me? Mastering and I mean mastering all of the tools and functionality doesn’t take too long at all. AWeber  have done a great job in ensuring the tool is intuitive and simple to use as possible. It has a good looking interface and the way the tool is designed it makes your job a lot easier to do. You do need to have a technical background or any skills in HTML at all. Ofcourse if you find you are struggling excellent support is a available as is a library of instructional materials, so give AWeber  a try.

Why use AWeber Autoresponders

To put simply ever since I began Online Marketing I noticed all of the Online Marketing “gurus” were using it, every mail list I signed up for I received confirmation from AWeber. But I did do a little bit of research around the web and out of the main Autoresponders out there I found it hard to find any negative comments about AWeber.

Furthermore I know a lot of Online Marketers who have been customers with AWeber for a long time so it looks like AWeber have a great retention rate, obviously keeping customers happy, and whats great about using such a popular tool is an online community seems to grow with it, meaning any questions or support you may need there a whole community out there who can not only point you in the right direct but also provide some great tips on how to utilize the tool to its full potential.

What about SPAM and Email Deliverability

Using the wrong tool on you email marketing campaigns, newsletters or broadcasts can have a detrimental impact on your organization and the deliverability of your emails (i.e the amount of emails that actually get through to your subscribers inbox). A lot of inexperienced providers offer services which may seem great but it doesn’t really matter if your email are not getting through as intended.
AWeber have the astonishingly highest percentage of email deliverability meaning AWeber is doing an excellent job to ensure emails are getting through to your subscribers (customers). Email Deliverability is something that should not be ignored.

How Much will it cost me?

AWeber is competitively priced. Obviously if you’re just starting out and have a subscriber list of between 0 – 500 paying only £12 ($18) per month is worth every penny to give your website that professional and more importantly automated edge. Furthermore there is a money back guarantee so if for some reason you don’t like it you have the satisfaction that a refund is available.

Click here to test drive or order an AWeber account today, alternatively sign up for a free test drive below.