Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Building an Opt-in List

The money is in the list! If you are new to e-commerce this statement may not make any sense to you just yet... but it will. What we mean by it is that many people with ecommerce websites make more money by mailing the contacts on their opt-in list, than they do from their normal, day-in-day-out web site traffic.

This topic is much too big to cover in this blog posting but suffice it to say that if you are in the ecommerce field you should be building an opt-in list. Let's say you have 500 visitors a day that visit your site. Once they leave they may never come back again. That means that you have lost 500 potential customers. However, if you develop an opt-in list strategy for your site, and begin to capture email address of visitors that visit, they you have a way, virtually free, to recontact these potential customers forever. Over time, as you build your list, you may have thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of emails address on your opt-in list, which you can mail at will - so long as you don't abuse the list by sending spam.

Let me give you a concrete example. I mailed two of my lists an offer to buy a competitors product this month. We were selling the product and being paid a commission by this company as an affiliate. The two lists combined totaled about 50K names. I generated just over $4000 in commissions from this effort. This should begin to give you an idea of why the money is in the list.

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