Best Way To Collect Email Addresses?

[Knowledge Kick]

I want to know the best way (effective and low cost) to collect emails from visitors to my site. Everytime a visitor clicks any of the sign-up links I'd like a page to appear that simply asks for Name and E-mail Address. After they enter this information they'd go directly to the sign up page, but just incase they back out I want to have their email for follow up purposes. What is the best system to implement? Is this easy for my programmer to set-up? I'm still inexperienced when it comes to building my sites so to be honest, I'm scared of messing anything up. What are your recommendations?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Knowledge Kick]

Bumping this up. I have the entire day off from work and I'm trying to be productive today guys! :smxB:

 

[Salinger]

You might want something like Aweber or icontact. These give you code for forms and popovers, etc. that ask for an email address which then goes into your database. Once they are in your database you can put them on whatever kind of campaign you want with autoresponders and other tools.

Now, enticing them to sign up is another matter. One route that a lot of people take is to offer something for free when they sign up. Since they usually need to double opt in, to be compliant with the anti-spam laws, it would go something like this:

• You offer a free recipe for the best apple pie ever.
• They give you their email address.
• This takes them to a Thank You page that tells them to look for a confirmation email (this weeds out fake addresses).
• They find the email your autoresponder sent and click the link.
• The link takes them to the page on your site where they can download the apple pie recipe, and confirms the address.
• After that, you have their email address and set them up on a program/campaign/whatever. Just be clear on your site what they are agreeing to let you do with their address.

I hope this gives you something to start with.

 

[Bobo]

Be careful here. With the Can Spam law you can't contact them unless they give you permission to and when you do email marketing you have to give them an unsubscribe link.

We built customer email lists with a previous business to great effect, we would kickoff an email'd sale flyer with a discount code, go to dinner and then come home to find an extra $5-10K in the account.

You can't go to this well too often, limit your emails and ensure that each one provides serious value to the customer or you will have folks unsubscribing.

Consider dividing your customer base into 3 groups, you can run a special to one group each month to keep a steady flow of customers while avoiding overload.

Also, if your list is pretty big send 4 versions of the flyer to subgroups, see which one got the best response and then use that one on the next group.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[neverfastenough]

I use Wufoo , which integrates nicely with MailCheat(Chimp).