Use Email to drive traffic to your website
We all hate spam and the proliferation of it over the last year is major source of concern for everybody in the industry. But this should not stop you using email as a way of keeping in contact with those people that are important to your business.
The Flybox story:-
Flybox is a small company that sells a CD catalogue of 1,500 flies used by fly fishermen all over the world. This might seem a little strange to people that are not fly fishermen, but within the fishing fraternity flies are indeed a thing of beauty and a wonder to behold.
We had undertaken various advertising campaigns for the CD, both through the trade press and on-line and discovered that, in the US, the enewsletter run by one of the biggest of the fly fishing magazine was the best way to promote the product.
We then decided to look for a way of building our own email list, starting with those people that had bought the CD via the website. We came up with the idea of putting together an email with detailed tying instructions for one fly every 2 weeks.
This involved commissioning an artist to sketch the intermediate stages in the build of a fly, and then write up the instructions. The email has proved very popular and every week we have existing recipients adding their friends to the mailing list which is the ultimate goal for any such programme.
The real trick is to be able to do this without manual intervention. This we achieved by installing a service on our server that has the following features;-
- Automatically removes any emails that are not deliverable
- Automatically deletes form the list any person that asks to be removed from the list.
- Automatically handles the confirmation process by which new recipients are added to the list (opt in confirmation).
- Semi-automatically controls the format of the email sent to them (eg html, text or AOL format.
- Provides a joining form that can be easily added to the website.
This keeps the process very clean and makes sure that we are not SPAMMING.
On top of this it enables us to track how the email is being received.
- Who looks at the initial email
- How often they open it
- Whether they follow specific links from the email to any other website.
This list has already doubled in size in the first 4 months that it has been running, and there is no indication of the growth rate slowing down.
In more general terms one is more likely to put the full article on the web site using a Content Management System and only send out the summary in the email, with a link to the main article.