Some might argue that building an opt-in mailing list is not e-commerce, because it is not directly involved in the "transactional" commerce. However, anyone who has been marketing online for more than a month knows that the gold is in the list -- you will continue to struggle selling online until you build a list, or become Yahoo!
So how do you start, and what does it have to do with Webware?
who are you selling to
what do they want
what makes you different from your competitors
Second, you will need an followup autoresponder service You can program the web part of this is python/webware, but unless you want to become an expert in handling spam complaints and staying off blacklists, you might want to leave the email broadcasting to someone else. YMMV.
relevant and specific to your offer
valuable to the prospect
easy for you to provide (low cost in money and time)
The plan is to offer the bribe as a motivation to get the suspect (e.g. fist time visitor) to opt-in. Once the suspect opts-in, he becomes a prospect, and you can begin to follow up with him until he knows, likes, and trusts you enough to buy when the time is right.
What does this have to do with Webware?
The ability to generate dynamic pages allows you to create a website that captures the opt-in aggressively without being annoying.
You can control when exit popups appear.
You can test multiple offers and easily track where the visitor came from.
You can offer a repeat visitor something he hasn't seen before.
If someone visits your website, and leaves without opting in it would be nice to know why. An exit popup survey is the perfect tool.
Before you go hollering, let me say that I work primarily in B2B markets, and my target market is not too terribly annoyed by popups. In a B2C market, you'll need to test it.
What about popup blockers? Well, there is not a lot we can do about them. But even if 90% of your popups get blocked, that's 10% that got through, and 10% of your abandonment traffic got a chance to tell you why they left. That's better than nothing.
If your visitor is coming from a Google AdWords Ad, you need to supress the popup. That's pretty easy with Webware.
- if "google" not in referrer:
# include popup code
Ok, now the part about not being annoying.
Suppose someone visits your site, then leaves and gets the popup. He answers the question, and clicks ok.
Later, he comes back, pokes about, then leaves again. Are you going to show him the same popup? No.
What if he just closed the popup the first time he left? Are you going to annoy him again by showing it again? Probably not.
How do you do this? Set a cookie (about 90 days) the first time the popup code gets loaded. When he comes back, you know from the cookie that he has already seen the popup, so you suppress it just like you did for Google.
If you have flash audio clips that play automatically, you'll want to use the same technique to say that they don't play automatically when the page is revisited.
In order to make your marketing messages most effective, you need to continually measure, change, and measure again.
The most significant Response Modifier is "traffic source." It's easy to set up different pages for different traffic sources if you have control of the link -- you can just link to a different page in the site. (But in terms of concentrating page rank, you may not want to do this all of the time.) If you don't have control of the link, you'll just need to trust the http-referrer header.
In any case, you'll want to track each traffic source, measure how many "hits" vs. "actions" you get (that's your conversion rate) and possibly create different offers for each.
Another important Response Modifier is the headline. How do you test a headline?
When someone first visits your page, you randomly select one of two (or more) headlines, and include that in the page. You also set a cookie (about 30 days) so he sees the same headline when he comes back or refreshes the page. When the visitor finally does take action (opt-in or purchase), you record that as an action for that particular headline. The first version to get 40 actions is the winner and becomes the new control.
Use the same pattern to test as many other response modifiers as you want. (BTW: you should never stop testing.)
Caveat: This part is just a theory. I have not tested it, and I don't know whether it works or not. After I do test it and get significant results, I'll come back and update this paragraph.
Suppose you have a dozen different sites that are related. Each site has a different ethical bribe, a different offer, and a different autoresponder sequence. Because the sites are related, someone who opts-in at one site is likely to be interested in the other sites and offers.
Suppose someone visits site A, opts-in, and downloads the ebook. The next time he visits site A, it may make sense to cross-promote site B. You can do that because you know he has already opted-in on A, so including the same offer as before is just wasting screen real estate. And if he goes to site B after opting-in on A and B, you can make offer C. Similarly if he keeps ignoring offer B, stop showing it to him.
If you would like more information about testing and tracking, or about building pages that compell the opt-in, you can join my shy-yes list.
-- TerrelShumway 10 July 2004