I’ve attended many internet marketing seminars over the last few years. At one of these seminars, the trainer on stage held a small cup.
Then, he poured a ton of pennies over the cup. Most of the pennies ended up scattered everywhere on the floor. Only a small handful of pennies ended up in the cup.
He poured the pennies again, but this time, he put a funnel over the cup. Many of the pennies still missed, but he filled that cup with pennies in just a couple of seconds.
The analogy is simple: if you capture as many leads as possible, you’ll make more sales and more money.
When people come to your membership site – whether it’s a sales letter or content focused membership site – you want to convert them to something. If it’s a sales letter, you want to convert them into a paying member. If it’s a content focused membership site, you want them to register for a trial offer or even a free membership level.
By adding a lead capture system to your membership site, you’re placing that “funnel” over your cup and getting more paying members.
That visitor might not yet be in the buying mood when you present your offer. Maybe he has lots of browser tabs open and he’s “researching” who he should buy from. Maybe he only has a limited amount of time and closes his browser before he’s done reading your sales letter or browsing your “teaser” content.
Whatever the reason is, you can easily miss a sale. But by collecting a name and e-mail address on your site, you can get people on a list and follow up with them day after day.
There are many autoresponder services that will handle this for you. In addition, you can write follow-up e-mails that will automatically send them MORE e-mail after a certain amount of time.
You can send a welcome e-mail when they first sign up… then maybe another message tomorrow, and another the next
day.
If there are some extra benefits they might have missed out when they read your page… you can remind them when you
send these follow-ups. Give them one of the benefits in the message you send out on day three, and another benefit on day five…
You could try hard selling, and hit them with a sales pitch in every e-mail, or you could try a low-pressure high-content follow-up series… and offer an ethical bribe in exchange for opting in.
They want that free report, or free software, so they give you their first name and e-mail address. You send the free report via e-mail and then you can start sending them more content, or more sales pitches, over time… so even if they didn’t buy RIGHT NOW, they’ll buy eventually.
Is this legal? Of course… most autoresponder services will save the first name, e-mail address, IP address, URL, time and date of every subscriber… so you are protected. You have proof that someone asked for this information.
You ALSO have a one-click unsubscribe function at the bottom of every e-mail, so if someone wants to stop getting messages from you, they click on ONE link and are gone forever.
An awesome service that handles all of this is Aweber, here is their link: Aweber.com
They handle everything for you… the opt-ins, unsubscriptions… you just sign up, create a list, and they give you some cut-and-paste code that you can paste on your site… and instantly add a form.
Then you write the follow-ups you want to send, and when people signup, they automatically get these messages.
