Importance Of Setting Up A Newsletter
March 3, 2008 | Marketing
The power of capturing your visitor’s email address is often underestimated by novice poker affiliates; I should know… I didn’t manage to get my hands on any of my visitors email addresses for months when I first started. And so I’m sure that I missed out on a decent amount of revenue when I first set up my site.
Having a list of your visitor’s emails is a great way to market to them long after they have left your site, and gives you the opportunity to get some extra RMPs under your belt. This means that even if a visitor to your site decides not to sign-up to an online poker room on their first visit, you will have the opportunity to turn that visitor into a real money player if you can just manage to get a hold of their email address.
Newsletters (Autoresponders)
The best way to get your visitor to give you their email address is to set up a newsletter (also known as an autoresponder) on your site. This will mean that you will have a small box that will allow your visitors to submit their email address, which will then be collected and stored somewhere for you to email them later on down the line. So to be able to collect of these email addresses, you will need to invest in some autoresponder software.
There are a number of companies on the web that will allow you to set up autoresponder on your site, but unfortunately some of these will not allow their autoresponder software to be used on gambling-related websites. However, there is a superb autoresponder that you can use called Aweber, and they are more than happy to allow gambling affiliates to set up an account with them.
The cost of using Aweber is $180 per year. This may seem quite steep, but it is definitely worth the money you pay for it. If you talk to any gambling affiliate about autoresponders, there is a very good chance that they will recommend that you use Aweber. It really is a very powerful tool to market to visitors of your site, and can be found on all of the top poker portals on the web.
If you think about it, if you manage to get just 2 RMPs from using the autoresponder alone over the 12 month period of using it, you will already have made your money back and more. So it really is in your best interest to go out and spend a little money to set up and autoresponder for your site; you will thank yourself for it later on.
Capturing those emails
When you have your autoresponder set up on your site, you need to be able to persuade your visitors to sign up. You could just let it sit there saying “Sign up for our monthly newsletter”, but it is likely that the amount of emails you get by doing this will be very low. The best way to get your visitors to give you their email address is to offer them something valuable in return.
A simple yet effective way to entice a visitor to sign up for your newsletter is to offer something like a poker eBook or a handful of interesting articles for just signing up. This is possible by configuring your Aweber account so that after every sign up, an email containing your eBook or articles will automatically be sent to the address the visitor signed up with.
The eBook or articles do not have to be huge pieces of work; they just have to be something useful that you can offer in return for your visitor’s email address. However, the more interesting it sounds, the more likely it is that visitors will sign up.
As a tip, you should offer information that would sound useful to the majority of your visitors. So something like “Sign up and get your free copy of the ‘7-Card Stud Mathematics’ eBook” wouldn’t really make many of your visitors want to sign up (unless you had a Stud site of course). So try and write something generic yet interesting, like an eBook on “The Top Secrets to Beating Online Poker”, or maybe something a little more inventive. Just make it something that will look useful to the majority of the visitors to your site.
A great example of how you can offer an eBook in return for your visitor’s emails can be found at www.sitandgoplanet.com (see the ‘A Comedy of Errors’ newsletter box).
Summary
It really is worth investing in an autoresponder if you haven’t yet done so. It may be a bit of an expense at the start if you are a new affiliate, but it will almost definitely be worth it in the long run through the extra money it will make you. The autoresponder allows you to catch those visitors that do not turn into real money players upon visiting your site, so that you have a second opportunity to get that extra CPA or the extra player on your MGR deal.
Effectively, you will be able to market to your visitors both off and on your site, which should dramatically increase your overall earnings at the end of the day.
So check out Aweber and see what you think, it’s probably one of the simplest business decisions that you will ever need to make.
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