Email Newsletters: Privacy and Unsubscribing Written by Robert F. Abbott
As you likely know from personal experience, value of email has been greatly tarnished by spam, unsolicited messages, online junk mail. So, many subscribers and would-be subscribers care very much about exposure of their email addresses.Since this issue is so important, articulate a privacy policy for your newsletter. Will you rent, sell, or exchange names of your subscribers to other organizations or persons? While most of us have no plans to do so when we are small, that opinion can change as we grow our list. Quite frankly, once your list gets to a certain size, you may be able to earn quite a bit of money by renting it out. Many magazine and subscription publishers find that difference between a profit and loss is list rental income. If you do decide to keep list names strictly to yourself, post a message to that effect somewhere, either in email newsletter itself, at sites where you collect names of subscribers, or both. By posting, and adhering to, a privacy policy, you will get more subscribers. To read an example, go my newsletter’s web page at http://www.abbottletter.com . If you’re not sure whether you will or will not sell or rent addresses, then put a note to that effect instead. Many companies do this by saying something like this: “Would you like to receive information messages by email from our valued partners?” To that, of course, you add a checkbox. The default position should be off, which is to say, subscribers have to click on box to receive those mailings. And, needless to say, you must then respect choice they make.
| | What is a Lead Worth?Written by Garland Coulson
Lately, I have been happily attracting leads for my Internet marketing products and services from a wide range of sources including search engine advertising, online classified ads and even an eBay campaign. But am I spending too much? What is a lead worth anyway? I figured I had better find out! Otherwise I could be spending more money than a lead is actually worth to me. Here is process I went through to determine how much I should pay for a lead.. 1. Defining what a lead is for you. There are different definitions of leads in different industries. For myself, I defined a lead as someone who actually visited my web site and signed up for either a free e-book or my newsletter. This way, I know they are interested in kind of help I offer. They have seen MY web site and they have freely given me their e-mail address to stay in touch. If you are buying lead lists from someone, value is much less because people haven't heard of you, they have just opted in to someone else's list. 2. Tracking your leads. It is critical that you are tracking your advertising to see how much of it is resulting in leads and sales. I dump 95% of all Internet advertising I try after first month because my tracking tells me it doesn't work! Without ad tracking, I would never know which campaigns were working and I would be wasting 95% of my marketing dollars. The ad tracking service I use is called 1ShoppingCart. They offer unlimited ad tracking and auto responders. 3. How many leads does it take to generate a customer? Not everyone who signs up for a free e-book or a newsletter becomes a customer. If only 1 in 100 of your signups become customers, you need to take this into account when you are valuing your lead. In my case, I feel 1 in 25 signups become a customer at some level.
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