E-mail marketing
Welcome to this the penultimate blog entry on the creation of highly effective alpaca marketing websites. So far we have covered; creating an identity for your farm, title tags, content, links, images, website URL, blogs and yesterday I talked about usability.

Today I want to talk about e-mail and mailing lists:
The easiest way to start this is to always ask yourself who, what, where, when and how?

Who are you going to send your mailshot to?
What are you going to ask them to do?
Where on the web will they go?
When are you going to do it?
How will you get them to do what you ask?

There are of course many answers to these questions and not just one correct answer. So play around and see what happens.

You can be direct and say "Come look at the alpacas I have for sale." Those people who click through will only be the ones who really want to look at your alpacas.

Or you can be less direct and say "Would you like to win a book about alpacas? - Then visit my website and enter the competition." The way I do this is to then to ask people to answer a simple question about one of the alpacas that I have for sale. Of all the people who enter one lucky winner is picked at random.

I really like this appproach. Firstly its fun and I like the idea that our alpaca farm is asssociated with enjoyment. Secondly, all the people who visit the site have to look at the alpacas for sale in order to answer the quiz question - this is of course my real goal -

I am sure you will have great ideas of your own, as I say there really are many ways to do this and not just one correct answer.

The best source of email addresses for this is the AOBA sales lead campaign. These sales leads are generated by AOBA and then have to be purchased by the AOBA membership. The leads come out each month and you should contact them as soon as possible. Over time you will build up a significant list of leads, otherwise known as people who are interested in buying alpacas. Any that reply to you directly MUST be tracked individually the remainder should be contacted at regular intervals say once each quarter. You can always break your master list down into three parts and contact one part every month. This helps spread out the work of following up on replies and creates a good monthly cycle to your marketing activities.

If you don't want to buy the AOBA sales leads then you need to generate your own leads. You can do this by having a newsletter sign up page on your website and keeping a visitors book on your stand when you attend shows or go to exhibitions. It will take much longer but you wont be sharing your leads with other ranches. which is of course what happens when you take the AOBA leads.

These aren't the only two options your affiliate may generate mailings lists or you can rent or buy mailing lists.

As with many things in life "you pays your money and you takes your choice..."