One thing you can’t neglect online is email addresses. Collecting opt-ins via some kind of newsletter engine like aweber, getresponse or iContact. I’ve written many long posts about WHY you shouldn’t ignore email addresses, but here’s the biggest one…

If your rankings fall (and google no longer places you at the top of the results) and pay per click marketing is too expensive, email addresses are like insurance. Sending a mailing is still virtually FREE.

Imagine this scenario… Your ranking #2 for one of the top phrases on the internet… Sales are POURING in and all of the sudden one day… POOF!! You’re gone and 6 other competitors swoop in for the grab! You quickly start pounding at Google Adwords putting money into it like your feeding a slot machine but not much is coming out… Your sales are dropping your profits are falling… What can you do?

Send an email! If you’ve been building up your list when things were good, you have thousands of people to drip on with your products and services for years to come until you figure out what caused your rankings problem and fix it.

Examples of GOOD opt-in offers.

A good opt-in bonus isn’t easy to figure out. It sounds simple enough to give something away, doesn’t it? Especially if it’s worth lots? But it isn’t. An old friend of mine told a story once of some beautiful leather office chairs he had put out in front of his business with a sign that said FREE in Montreal, Quebec. The chairs sat there for weeks without a taker. One evening, as a joke to make the boss laugh, an employee put a sign on the chairs that said $50 each… They were stolen that night!

Moral of the story? Place value on things!

Your opt-in shouldn’t just be valuable, but it should also be a filter. This is probably the most juicy piece of information on this post. Ignore the rest, but this is the kicker. Think about who your IDEAL customer is. Think about what HE wants…

For example, my IDEAL customer has not time to execute their online marketing themselves. So my opt-in box isn’t going to have a “7 steps to get traffic online” that would only give me customers who would do the work themselves! My opt-in will say “How to hire the right marketing team” or “7 Deadly Mistakes your business is making online”.

What can you give away?

Most people struggle with what to give away. What should the offer itself be? What can I give them that will cause them to give me their email address?

• Offer a free course
  Using today’s autoresponders its really easy to setup a new message every 2 days for 5 days each with a 2 page little write up on the same topic. Before long you have a 10 day course!
• Offer a free e-book, report or study
  The variety of topics you can write on are limited only to your imagination… You can use fear (7 deadly..) greed (explode your..) pride (your friends will…) jealousy (why don’t you have..) vanity (You’ll look…) laziness (in 2 easy steps..) but make your report stand out! Make it something they want!
• Offer a downloadable toolbar, graphic or template
  Especially a wise idea if you have a web dev blog and you give away some sort of template or tool.
• Contests, puzzles or games
  Heck even a quiz could be handy… Like “Do you know the 7 most important…”
• Free Video
  Could be a how to video or a demonstration video but everyone likes to watch exclusive things only a few have seen.
• Members only specials
  Members of our newsletters recieve X and no one else gets that benefit, are you a member?

One of my biggest passions is copy writing. I’ve got a 72″ tall shelf that’s 90% full of copy writing resources from the 1920′s on up until today’s copy samples. I can’t get enough of it and I’m always staying on top of it. If your struggling to come up with an opt-in offer that jumps off the page and compels people to give you their email address, perhaps we need to talk.

Drop me a line. E: dano@answerswanted.com – Subject: Copywriting.

Bonus Tips:

Sincerely,
Daniel J Deyette