The best way to collect visitor email addresses?

[Tommy]

Does anyone know the best way to harvest visitor email addresses? What scripts or programs do you use? I had a friend recommend feedburner, but I'd like to see what some of the new rich are using.

What do you use?

- Tommy

[Stallion]

I think the best is a paid service like aweber or getresponse.

They cost around $20 a month and they're worth the money because they work hard to keep their emails off spam filters. No use having someones email, if it just goes into their spam box.

As welll, you can set up sequence of emails. Like for your frat book, you could have them enter in their email and have them verify and it will automatically send them to the person as often as you want.

And they sound personal too.

Hey Chris,

I'm just sending you the second chapter on starting your own fraternity. It's on the subject of ....

[lovinglife]

Aweber.

Offer them a free to get them to sign up and then send them something on a regular basis. Some people use a free books, report, etc. to attract people and then send them a newsletter on a regular basis. Be clear in your advertising that is what is going to happenL "Sign up for my free ebook on how to spin straw into gold and you'll also get my bi-weekly newsletter "Franny's Fabulous Fact from Fairytales"

Or just offer a newsletter without the added bonus. "Sign up to ge my free weekly newsletter "Marvin's Monday Motivations".

You need to get your name in front of their face over and over. I think the study is it takes an average of 7 times before people will buy. We have people on our weekly newsletter lists that wait months before they make their first purchace.

One big tip - make sure whatever you send out has free content that the reader can use and not just an advertisement for your business/product. It can be something as simple as a short paragraph telling them how to create a stunning centerpiece out of duct tape. If you send them nothing but "buy my product" each time, they will unsubscribe and consider you just another spammer.

[Tommy]

I'm not sure that I'm ready for a paid service yet.... what do you recommend that's free?

I'm talking about a simple email opt-in form, and a quick auto responder one time... I can send out follow up emails manually for now, as my email base will probably only be a handful of people at first

I am reluctant to spend money after I read one of steve pavlina's posts on entrepreneurship, which was so simple, but so true. He said something along the lines of "When I started my first business, I made the vital mistake of not realizing that every time I spent money, I had to make that money back!" haha

Any suggestions on free ways to get opt-in email?

- Tommy

[Stallion]

Well, I used phplist, which is a free script that you should be able to one click install if your host has fantastico. It worked okay I guess. I don't think emails ever arrived at yahoo addresses though.

[andyYY]

I'm not sure that I'm ready for a paid service yet.... what do you recommend that's free?

I'm talking about a simple email opt-in form, and a quick auto responder one time... I can send out follow up emails manually for now, as my email base will probably only be a handful of people at first

I am reluctant to spend money after I read one of steve pavlina's posts on entrepreneurship, which was so simple, but so true. He said something along the lines of "When I started my first business, I made the vital mistake of not realizing that every time I spent money, I had to make that money back!" haha

Any suggestions on free ways to get opt-in email?

- Tommy

Can I say I hate him?

Really,it's just personal but..I'm a ROI and product-confidence believer.

If i know my product will rock (and it's for a niche)


and investing 100$ will take me back 1.000$,then it's good spent money...

And right now in Italy if you want to start EVERYTHING you will need at least 7-8 k of euros (license,rental,etcetc)

So...should be right or not spending? I call it investing,and not everyone do it properly...

[Tommy]

Can I say I hate him?


For an email form??

It really makes you that angry, that I would want to spend as little as possible while I'm micro testing my muse?

What the hell kind of ROI am I going to get on a free opt-in email form vs. one that costs $20 a month??

Why would you be proud of the fact that it costs you 8k Euro to start your business??

I lived in Italy for 4 months, and I agree, they certainly suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit over there. One big mistake in a personal business and you can forget about ever starting one again.

Why would I want to bring on more expenses if it's not necessary?

andyYY, you sir, are a douche.

- Tommy

[lovinglife]

I'll readily admidt that I don't know the first thing about scripts, etc. But I do know from first hand experience that insuffient opt-in program can cost you far more in time, lost customers, being blocked as a spammer, etc. than the few dollars of "insurance" that something like aweber charges. Kind of hard to run a business, even if it's in test stage, when you can not get email and your web host shuts down your site. Been there, done that.

[Stallion]

Tommy, I think he was referring to Steve Palvina that he hates.

I agree with him, there is a certain degree of investment involved and I think spending $20 a month on an email service isn't that big of a deal. They simplify the system and allow you to automate it with great email deliverability, plus statistics.

When you get down to the nuts and bolts of things, you pay $10 for a domain name for the year. You pay a couple bucks a month for webhosting. If a $20/month on an email service that will double or triple your conversion rate is too much, than there is a problem.

I understand the desire to be frugal because I'm frugal as hell, but there are places to spend money and this is one of them.

This still puts your initial first month investment of this muse below $40 and your monthly cost of running it at around $25. I don't think there are any other businesses you can start out there this cheap.

[Tommy]

Good point, however I feel like there are so many people on this board that just throw money around trying to get something started. I have a number of friends, as well, that love the phrase "You gotta spend money to make money!" when that just isn't the case.

I just read a post on here about someone wanting to throw down $6,000 on a basic website?! Why not get a free blogspot blog and do some testing?

$20 a month is $240 a year. If I can find it for free... why wouldn't I?

The other response I always see on here is "it's not worth my time". Maybe it's just because I'm young, at home (leaving for Japan in 3 weeks), and have all the time in the world. But if you're sitting around, posting on these forums, what do you mean you don't have the time? It's the same thing for a VA. The idea of a VA seems so bad ass, but really? You really need to outsource someone to find a hair saloon for you?

You raise a good point about spammers, but I'm still not sold that email opt ins even work. I personally hate them, and I'm not sure why other people would get suckered into them, but we'll find out, right?

Once I learn how to develop the script myself, I can implement it, and be on my way, without losing $240 a month (almost 5 book sales)..... automation at $0 a month babyyyyy!

- Tommy

[lovinglife]

You raise a good point about spammers, but I'm still not sold that email opt ins even work. I personally hate them, and I'm not sure why other people would get suckered into them, but we'll find out, right?

- Tommy

The email list I am referring to is for my regular business - not my muse (haven't done much with that due to being in and out of the hospital all year). Our email list started about five years ago. After the "spam" incident, about three years ago, we moved to aweber which basically scrubbed our list from us and we had to start rebuilding (we lost about half the list). The current total for all our free sign-ups is over 30,000. And. yes, they do buy - not all of them. but enough to keep six people employed.

[Stallion]

Well it's your choice Tommy, I'm not going to twist your arm. When you pay for these services, you're paying for more than something that just sends emails, you're paying for something that actually arives at the persons mailbox. ISPs aren't shy about banning emails, considering that 90% of emails is regarded as spam.

And they sell. Despite the fact that we both hate those long sales page and email opt-ins, they sell. I think you can agree having a chance to sell someone over and over again, does much better than one time only, right?

[Tommy]

Yep. You're right. I have implemented a free one, which doesn't completely automate the emailings, theres a little manual work to be done, but now I can collect visitors that are more interested, and I will pay for a premium service if I find a market.

Thanks for the advice everyone!

- Tommy

[Stallion]

Good luck. Wish you the best with the product. Very Unique.

Actually today I just thought of a unique one too, that I'm going to try out. It'll be my first. *I decided to start out affiliate marketing to learn about selling first*.

I have a feeling every page I write of the ebook, I'll be laughing my ass off.

BTW. I started out the same way. I did phplist first because I wasn't convinced it actually made sales. It sort of blows, but it captures the emails.

The cool thing is if these people don't buy, you can always sell them something later. You know if you got their email their fraternity related, so you can make another product related to that, or you can sell someone else's. I imagine getting laid is on the fraternities mind.

[Gunn]

Send Blaster (http://www.sendblaster.com/)

You can always find stuff for free...

Havent had a chance to use it myself, but its backed by wordpress, in fact, there is a plug in to integrate if that is what you are using... wordpress rocks.

Good luck!

[bargaindoctor]

Watch out with aweber. Great autoresponders etc but they only keep email lists for 2 months. I now use GetResponse.

[Gunn]

PHP List (http://www.phplist.com/)

I cant believe I forgot this one...

Integrates with pretty much everything. You can use send blaster in conjunction with this code as well.

Why spend money when you have open source

[webgal]

I use php list. But it's not the easiest interface.

Blog post on this subject is below.

email (http://webpreppro.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/05/email-marketing-tips-on-improving-your-email-open-rates/)

[andyYY]

andyYY, you sir, are a douche.

- Tommy


I was referring to steve, not to you,thanks for the douche title.

The Queen of England right now invested me as "Sir Andy Douche of York"


LOL.

[andyYY]

Why would you be proud of the fact that it costs you 8k Euro to start your business??





Proud???? It's a reason to cry not to be proud :D


Btw I think Stallion understood was I was explaining.

If you spend 50 bucks on your site for a perfect automation it's acceptable,If you spend 0 and have the same results (practical,professional,guaranteed etcetc) it's better

Just sometimes,people that ask money for a product will give you some extras that open source lacks..

[Stallion]

I just thought of another way of doing this that is free, you'll have great deliverable rates, you just can't automate a sequence of emails (or maybe you can??).

Feedburner.

Basically feedburner is a tool for a blogs RSS feed. Basically, it alerts someone of new messages that they can read, right in an RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc).

But you can also set it up where people double optin(That means they verify their email address), and they just get emailed a copy.

So you can just set up a blog some where in a hidden directory on your server. Everytime you want to send out an email, you just write a blog post.

-----
Edit:
Oh, I thought of a way of maybe automating email responses.

Like if you had them optin for a course, you'd obviously need to send them each lesson in order. But if you made each email message timeless, than it wouldn't matter what order they get it. So you write the 7 emails on your blog, install a plugin to automatically cycle through the blog posts and you got yourself an automated email responder, with great deliverability and it's absolutely free.

How's that for a hack lol.

I think I'll write a blog post guiding people through this.

I'm not 100% sure on feedburner email rehashed posts, but we'll see. I'll make sure I test it on lazy Sunday tomorrow.

[Tommy]

I ended up taking the PHPLIST path, which I highly recommend. I now have a great way to harvest email addresses and keep them in a database. and it was free!

Thanks guys!

[italian_job]

aweber is the one i use

remember that the goal is to build HIGHLY responsive lists, not just to build a list.

This is so crucial. I have setup many different autoresponders with aweber and each of them is fully customized to the prospect with whom i build a solid relationship

In term of sales conversion, I have noticed a very strong correlation between small, highly targeted lists and sales

Build you sub-lists, be patient.

if you do it right, then nothing can stop you online

good luck


====================================

www.JamesBradley.info

===================================

[webgal]

I have found it very beneficial to build a good, highly-targeted list. The open rates are much better and the sales follow.