Forms and newsletters.

"Form"ulating Success.
by Richard Igoe

In today's competitive world of internet marketing, it is essential to be able to communicate with your prospects. Any visitor that has found your website is probably already interested in your product or service, so to convince them to buy you need to get their email addresses on your newsletter.

This is a simple 2-step process. 1) Set up a form to captureyour visitors email addresses. 2) Set up a system to distribute your newsletter.

SETTING UP A FORM

If you don't you will be losing 70% of your potential customers. You need to be able to remind them to come back to your site and to inform them of special offers or new products or services.

You should place your form strategically on your home page where it will be noticed. It does not have to be large. A simple box on the side of the page will do fine.

If you include the word "BECAUSE" your newsletter subscription will skyrocket. Give your visitors a reason to subscribe. You could offer them free information, access to a members area, or something that will be of real value to them. You can get some ideas from our "free" page on our website.

Remember, don't ask for too many details or you will scare your prospects away. However you can easily ask them for their name and email address. You should also clearly state your privacy policy - let your visitors know that you are not going to distribute their addresses to third parties.

If you are paying for website hosting you almost certainly have a cgi-bin which will allow you to set up a form. Some free website hosts however do not give you a cgi bin because of security issues.

If cgi scripts are beyond you at the moment, you can get a free form here. With this option you don't need to know how to upload the scripts. All you will have to do is copy and paste some HTML code onto your webpage. Bravenet hosts your form and sends you a notification whenever someone submits it.

For those who don't know, a form works like this. You upload a form script to the "cgi-bin" on your website server (where you host your site). You then put some HTML code on your webpage. When someone fills in the form and clicks on the "Submit" or "Send" button, the information is sent to the "cgi bin" on your website server. The script you have put on your server (form handler) "handles" this information and sends you the results of the form. It will take you a few hours to get it to work properly, but believe me, if you are getting website traffic and don't yet have a form, you are certainly losing sales.

A form will also allow you to redirect the visitor to a thank-you page. Take advantage of this and make sure you redirect them to your special offer page.

YOUR NEWSLETTER
Once your form is set up you can get it to send any email addresses either to you or to a newsletter server. If the cgi script sends YOU the form details you will have to manually copy and paste the details into a mailing list.

However you can automate this by sending the details to a newsletter server where visitors can subscribe and unsubscribe automatically. Automation of your newsletter management will save you time and let you concentrate on promotion and marketing.

Threre are a number of sites on the web which will let you start off your own mailing list however you will also have to display their ads on your newsletter and sometimes there are delays in sending out your newsletter because of the number of free users. If you want more control over your newsletter, you can use an autoresponder service. This gives your mailing list a bit more class, and you can be more certain that your newsletter is reaching your subscribers on time. You can send your newsletters out from the admin login via the web.

You also need to format your newsletter to between 55 or 65 characters a line BECAUSE: a) it is easier to read short lines b)many people set their email programs to read only 65 characters so if you wrote your newsletter with 80 characters, the lines would appear broken.

There is an excellent free application called eZine Assistant that will do all this for you. Ezine assistant can be downloaded free from our downloads gateway - click here.

Now you are ready to roll. Simply cut and paste your newsletter from your eZine Assistant or other text editor into the online form on your website and send it out to your mailing list.