If you don't collect addresses, your marketing effort is a one-shot wonder. You're making only one attempt per visitor to achieve a sale and then giving up.
As branding expert Rob Frankel says, people like buying from people they know, like and trust.
If you're not giving people a chance to get to know and trust you, don't be surprised if they don't buy.
If you're not collecting email addresses, you're seriously crippling your marketing. Remember how the big dot-coms poured buckets of money into banner advertising and TV advertising? Now they've finally realized that collecting email addresses is much better value.
It's getting harder and harder to do, because we're all deluged with spam and newsletters which don't provide the information we need. So get started now, before the competition becomes even stronger.
You may not want the commitment of publishing a weekly newsletter. Perhaps you don't believe you have the necessary skills. One option is to simply offer a monthly Update newsletter, telling people what's new on your site.
Perhaps you don't like the thought of being tied to a weekly or monthly publishing schedule. You don't have to be. You can publish irregularly, only when you feel you have something worth saying - or selling.
If you want a cheap, no-nonsense, no-hype guide to newsletter publishing, I recommend Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing by Chris Pirillo. It's a little old now, but it still tells you a heap of things useful things. You can usually get it second hand from Amazon for almost nothing. It's an old classic.
For a more advanced guide to email publishing, I recommend The Insider Secrets to E-mail marketing - Advanced Series by Derek Gehl and the Internet Marketing Center. It shows you everything, from growing a super-responsive opt-in list as quickly as possible, to generating the highest possible revenue from every email you send, to protecting your business from being wrongly accused of spamming and knowing how to effectively deal with it if you are. This is vitally important stuff you need to know before you begin.
Reliable newsletter distribution
To distribute your newsletter, you need to make sure you deal with a company that has an excellent reputation - one that has a good chance of getting your newsletter delivered instead of having it go into spam folders or simply be deleted, unseen by the subscriber.
Over the years, I've used a various services to distribute my newsletters. My clear favorite is Aweber. It has a really tough anti-spam stand, and it gets your newsletter delivered reliably, for a very reasonable price. We also use it for autoresponders.
Build an opt-in email list.
