A website has the potential to close a sale once, with a good sales copy and good value product. But sales copies typically have a conversion ratio of 1 – 5%. Even the best copies out there manage to sell 5% of the time… that is 1 in 20 hits.

So, Internet Marketers out there – how else do make full use of your traffic?

The answer lies in opt-in lists!

The thing is, not everyone who visits your page is willing to part with their money at the point in time, for some reason or another. However, this does not mean that they are not interested in the product that you are selling. When you have a mechanism to keep in touch with these potential customers, you can get these people back to your website when you have, for example, a new product, or a new investment scheme, or a time limited discount!

So, the essential Internet Marketing tool is called an opt-in list.

How do you get people to opt in?

The next question then is… how do get people to put their email down in the box and opt-in in the first place? What many Internet marketers do right now, is to offer a free service or a free report, in exchange for the email address. Another way is to propose for them to sign up for a monthly newsletter.

Once your opt-in list is filled with addresses, it is important to keep your list updated and interested. You need give these people good information, and information that they would be interested to know. While your primary objective may be to get these people come back to your website and make a purchase, it is essential to balance between emails of information and sales copies. Send out too many sales copies in a row, and you will find people unsubscribing from your list!

Email Marketing Suite

To manage your email lists, you need a email marketing suite. Well, you can email from your regular mail client, but it will take ages if you need to send a mail and your list has 10,000 subscribers! Typical email a clients are not built to handle loads like that. There are two alternative to this.

The first option to subscribe for a web based email marketing service, like GetResponse. GetResponse is one of the more recognized follow-up
systems on the Internet, and it allows you to leverage on a fast and reliable email server. With web based email marketing services like GetResponse, everything is done online – creating your email campaign, building opt in boxes, tracking your subscribers… no hassle installing software. GetResponse also features a 30 day trial, so do sign up for it and give it a go, before you make your decision to purchase.

Using a web based service, however requires you to pay every month. The other alternative, is to get an email marketing software. One of these, which I know of is MailLoop, by the Internet Marketing Center. MailLoop is an email automation tool that you will have to install on your computer. I haven’t had the opportunity to give a go at MailLoop, but from the reviews and the testimonials I have read, it seems like a good piece of software if you are really into email marketing.

In doing Internet Marketing, I think it is important to buy software created specifically for Internet Marketers, and not any geeky software you find out there. I was once working with a friend on a project using a piece of software, and we greedily chose the cheaper $197 version as opposed to the original one, which was sold at over $400. It was a disastrous choice. The code was buggy, and we had to fix the bugs ourselves, wasting much time and effort.