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One of the most important actions you can take to increase your sales is to build a mailing list and keep in touch with current and potential customers with mailings they want to read.

Two Ingredients for Building and Maintaining a Profitable List

It costs exponentially less time, money, and effort to retain someone who is already interested then to attract a new customer. Building and retaining a list of warm leads is a 2-step process. First you need to give them a good reason to opt in to your emails and then you’ll have to deliver quality information to keep them.

Offer a Sign-up Incentive

If you’ve compiled enough great content, you’ll have a pretty good idea what will interest the people who visit your website. If you’ve built a website about self promotion then it’s likely that people visiting will be very interested in learning more about how to promote themselves. To encourage an opt-in, offer solid, valuable information such as an e-book or special report in exchange for a newsletter sign up.

Multiple Targeted Incentives

Try experimenting with different offers and see which gets the best results. You can also offer different incentives on different pages of your site. If you have an events page that lists all of the upcoming happenings of interest to your readers, you may want to offer a different incentive and promise an email notification every time a new event is scheduled.

How much is an Opt-In Worth?

Don’t be afraid to offer something valuable. People pay ridiculous amounts of money for non-targeted mailing lists, knowing that most of the mail will be thrown away. A targeted opt-in is extremely valuable. The better the offer, the more opt-ins you will get.

No Surprises

People also want to know what they’ll be getting from you in their inbox. No one wants to receive junk mail and most people get so much mail that you need to promise the type of content that they might choose to seek out. This way you’re doing them a favor and saving them time by delivering the information straight to their inbox.

Choosing a Newsletter Campaign

There are several important things to look for when deciding on the tools to deliver and manage your newsletter campaign.

• Spam Compliance
• HTML or Text
• Message Personalization
• Branding and Custom Images
• Interest Group Segmentation
• Analytics
• Cost

Spam Compliance

The CAN-SPAM Act states that any type of commercial email must be asked for by the recipient in or must be clearly labeled as an advertisement. There are a few additional requirements such as:

• Correct and straightforward “to” and “from” information
• Accurate subject line
• Clear opt-out function
• Include the sender’s full postal address

The newsletter management tool you choose should include a seamless method for customers to

• Sign Up
• Receive a confirmation email
• Add confirmed email to your mailing list
• Instantly remove those who op-out from your email

Email Formatting – HTML or Text?

Most people have a preference to one type of email or another and sending the type that you prefer could alienate some of your recipients. Look for an email management tool that allows the customer to decide which type of email they will receive.

Message Personalization

Personalizing your email messages is a nice touch, especially when people receive so many cold and impersonal emails. A good newsletter management program will provide you with tags to place in your message that will insert the recipients personalized info.

Branding and Custom Images

You don’t want to send your subscribers and endless stream of advertisements. However, the goal of a newsletter mailing list is to build your customer base. Design a logo that customers will associate with your book or your message and consistently add it to the header of all of your email campaigns.

Interest Group Segmentation

You may target different interests throughout your site. If each interest group is attracted to different types of information then you’ll need a way to segment your mailing list and send targeted messages to the individual groups.

Analytics

A tool to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns in critical to your success. Set a goal to achieve a certain number of emails opened. Set another goal for the number of people who click through to your site from the email. With statistical information, you’ll be able to fine-tune your campaigns until you achieve your desired results.

Cost

Email marketing is by far the most cost effective way to reach customers. However, prices for different tools vary widely.

Comparison for 833 emails per month or 10,000 per year:

Constant Contact: $30/month $360/year
Mail Out: $19.95/month $239.40/year
nGenuity Solutions: $4.83/month $58/year

Take the Tour

Because we believe that email marketing is so powerful for authors and small businesses we have priced our email campaigns far below the competition. Our goal is to help the individuals and small businesses succeed by offering tools and resources in the appropriate price range.

Complete Feature List

Start building your new website today with Easy Website Builder

Three Days to Building a Winning Book Promotion Campaign

A - Drive Traffic
Learn how to move to the top of the search engine rankings by identifying popular searched keywords and crafting SEO optimized headlines and text.

B - Brand yourself
Readers identify with your message when they have a chance to get to know and trust you. Learn ways to enhance your credibility and establish yourself as an industry expert.

C - Attract loyal customers with high quality content
Sell more books by offering enough free information to get people interested, but not so much that you sacrifice sales

D - Interesting, fresh content
Keep readers coming back to your site consistently new and updated content. Learn how to generate lots of great new content without spending countless hours of work with RSS feeds, and articles archives.    

E - Sell your books
Use the product module to add your book to your site in 2 clicks and sell your books right from your site.  If you're selling through Amazon, learn how to set up an affiliate link to your book to generate a greater sales percentage.  

F - Build a mailing list
Keeping a customer is far easier than gaining a new one.  Learn the secrets of building a targeted mailing list to stay in touch with people who already have expressed interest in your book or idea. Find resources for creating and managing a newsletter campaign and learn how to insert forms into Easy Website Builder.

G- Earn Affiliate Profits
Earn additional revenue by offering thousands of high quality products targeted to your site's visitors from a variety of sources.

H - Earn cash for clicks
Use Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher to add an additional stream of revenue. Find resources, information, and tutorials to maximize your profits and learn how to add the code into your Easy Website Builder Software.