Dewell Marketing

As your website gets more and more exposure in the internet, you will get more and more visitors coming to see what you are all about. But just because they visit your website doesn’t mean you will know who they are.

That would be a pity after you spent all that time and effort to get found! So how do you find out who they are? You offer them something of value for free if they will just give you their name and email address.

You do this by placing a “form” on your website sidebar which makes the offer and gives them the place to give you their information. This form will be generated by your auto-responder system which will also follow up the sing up with a special email that you have written for that purpose.

And you will follow the first “thank you” email up with several more, spaced at strategic intervals, providing them with an ongoing stream of valuable information about your business. Along the way, you will also offer them a product or service that they can buy, thus monetizing the whole process.

There are several really good email marketing and auto-responder products on the market. I use two different ones for separate parts of my business primarily to see which one I like best. But there are other good ones as well.

AWeber – one of the best known systems. I find it easy to use and have sent hundreds of emails from it without a hitch. They often have $1.00 free trails, but the system will costs$19/month for 500 email subscribers, or $29.00/month for up to 2,500.
http://www.aweber.com/

Mail Chimp – this is the 2nd one I use and I am still getting used to it since the way you use it is quite a bit different than AWeber. One great feature here which is useful for a client’s business is that it links automatically to their E-Commerce platform so that they can follow up purchases with emails just like they can with new prospects.
And never forget, it’s easier to get an existing customer to buy again, that to win a new one!
Its big advantage is that it’s FREE for the first 1000 subscribers; then it goes to $30/month for up to 2,500.
http://www.mailchimp.com/

iContact – this one comes highly recommended by many email marketers that I follow. It seems to be very good and easy to use. Their Basic Plan is for a business with up to 2500 email subscribers and runs $24.65/month.
http://www.icontact.com/

There are several others like InfusionSoft which is a major contact management system which does lots more than the others, but it is my impression it is really designed for serious email marketers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and not a small-to-medium sized business that may have only several thousand.

These systems manage emails, but they don’t write them  But email marketing is all about what you say and how you say it to your subscribers. That is covered in more detail under “Email Marketing” in the Resources section.