Building your opt-in list of subscribers is an essential for online success. Opt-in subscribers, or leads/prospects are your visitors who left some kind of contact information on your site (usually a name and an e-mail address) and agreed to receive periodic e-mails from you.
Your opt-in list gives you an opportunity to stay in contact with your visitors, to keep them updated about any changes on your site and to build a certain relationship with them. And by sending them news and keeping them updated, you can also invite them to return to your website.
Inviting people to return to your site is an excellent way to increase traffic and your sales. It has been statistically calculated that an average person must see some interesting offer at least 5 - 7 times before making a purchase. Not only you can improve your conversion rates by having your own list, you can also offer your previous customers some other and new product or service. If they were satisfied with your product or service before, they will most likely purchase from you again!
Buildin an Opt-In list is really not that complicated. You must set up an autoresponder service, create an upload messages it will send to your subscribers, place subscription form on your site and finally drive traffic to your subscription form. I will place here a complete course on how to build opt-in list. It sounds easy, but can be very complicated and building Opt-In List is only a first step. You must also keep contact with your subscribers constantly so they don't forget about you.
To maintain contact with a large number of people you'll need an Autoresponder. Autoresponder sends e-mails to everyone in your list on your behalf. It can even send prewritten messages in a different time intervals. And it can also personalize all your messages to all your prospects. Every message sent to your prospects contains an unsubscribe link, so each of your subscribers can choose to opt-out at any time. This is extremely important for avoiding spam complains. With an autoresponder you can truly put your business on an autopilot. It does nearly all the work for you.
You have probably seen many different sites that uses an autoresponder. Nearly every membership site (ezine, safelist ...) uses autoresponder to keep contact with their members. It would be impossible to manually send messages to everyone.
You can install an autoresponder script on your website, or you can use a third party autoresponder. Third party autoresponders are much easier to integrate with your site than having your own autoresponder script installed.
If you wish to use free services, I'd recommend you check FreeAutobot. This autoresponder is completely free and without ads, but due to many free users, server often becomes overloaded and won't work and you will loose precious leads, or messages won't be delivered. This happened to me many times.
This one is one of the best online - GetResponse! GetResponse is very reliable autoresponder and you can open a free account. Free account allows you to send up to a five messages. For a full use this autoresponder requires a fee. But if you are serious about your online business I highly recommend it. You can open a free account and set up 5 pre-written messages and intervals of time between messages. They will provide you a HTML code to place on your site for gathering prospects (opt-in subscribers).
After you've set up your messages and integrated autoresponder with your site, you should focus on driving traffic. People will enter their e-mail address and the number of your prospects will increase over time. Imagine if you had 100.000 of prospects and at least 60% to 80% of them will read every e-mail you send them. How much free traffic will each of your e-mails bring (not to mention sales)?
