You may know what email marketing is but did you fully take advantage of email marketing’s features? If you are struggling to capture and generate qualified leads for your company, there are two very important email marketing features that every email marketers not to be missed. They are the newsletter subscription form and autoresponder. These two email marketing features play a very important role in the pre-sales process and the reasons are explained as follow.
Newsletter Subscription Form
The purpose of the newsletter subscription form is to encourage visitors to subscribe to the company’s newsletter so that you can capture the visitors’ names, email addresses and other information. This information will become your in-house mailing list or sometimes known as subscribe list, it can then be used as a customer relationship building avenue. You can email exclusive information, invitation and promotion to your in-house mailing list as frequent as you want so that they know you make an effort to be in touch with them. By doing so, it also help to keep your visibility high in their minds. Most companies today also realized that they could get more sales faster from the inhouse mailing list than any other channels.
The newsletter subscription form is therefore an important feature not to be missed. It is not only an automatic lead capturer but a friendly tool to auto manage your subscribe list where subscribers subscribe, unsubscribe and bounce due to invalid domains and emails. It is easy to integrate newsletter subscription form into your website, many email marketing system offer easy to do it. If you are using Constant Contact for example, click on the “Contacts” on the top menu and click on “Join My Mailing List”. Under the “Add a Join My Mailing List Box to Your Website”, click on “Start Wizard to generate HTML code” to get customized subscription form, select the HTML code in the box and paste it into your website. Once your code is successfully pasted into the website, the newsletter subscription form will look like the following.
You can now start to collect the names and email addresses and in order to entice more people to sign up, you could offer them free gifts like free eBook for download, free coupon and discount. Make sure your subscribers are the first one to receive the free offer so that they can feel the worth of signing your newsletter.
Autoresponder
Another important email marketing feature is the autoresponder; it is an automatic program that answer emails that sent to it. The most popular use of autoresponder is “out-of-office” message but it plays a much more important role and function in email marketing. For instance, whenever someone subscribes to your mailing list, the autoresponder will automatically send a preset message to the subscribers. It could be a welcome message or a series of messages introducing the company product, services or even sales letters. All these messages can be set up once only and automatically send to every single subscriber. This greatly reduces your manual works and allows you to focus on your core competency.
In addition, we know that visitors normally don’t buy at their first visit, they may need a few round of exposures before they take action so by sending constant emails using autoreponder, it can act as a good reminders and follow-up. To do so, you can create different and customized autoresponders for your subscriber lists and all these different autoresponders can be set at a consecutive date and time you want to send. For example you are offering free investment tips to new subscribers and you can set up your autoresponder as follow.
Day 1:
Autoreponder 1 – Welcome message to New Subscribers
Day 2:
Autoresponder 2 – Overview of Today’s Investment
Day 3:
Autoresponder 3 – What are the Investment Instruments?
Day 4:
Autoresponder 4 – What are the Investment Strategies?
Day 5:
Autoresponder 5 – Tips on selecting the Right Investment?
All the above autoresponder can be set a day apart and send to new subscribers consecutively for 5 days. On the last day, you can send a personalized email asking them whether they need any help on investment. This is a good time you can propose a sale and close a deal with them.
Once you understand the benefit, it is recommended you try it out yourself. A customized autoresponder is not difficult to set up with the step-by-step wizard in any email marketing system. In Constant Contact, for example, you can click on the main menu “Emails” and click on “Autoresponder” and start by giving it a name and then proceed with the customization of design and message. You can even add a web page version if the recipient’s email client cannot support html messages. The autoresponder also has a “Forward to friend” feature so it can help to spread your message virally.
The newsletter subscription form and autoresponder are like your 24×7 salesperson capturing the leads and follow up with them automatically without your need of personal supervision. It definitely saves you a lot of time and resources. If you have not explored the full potential of these two helpful email marketing features, try it out today.
Tags: autoresponder, Email Marketing, features of email marketing, newsletter subscription form
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