Posted in Driving Website Traffic	May 7, 2007

Learn what you should include with a mailed product to get more customers to sign up for your free email newsletter

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group LLC

I mentioned last week that website publishers should be using retail channels—both on and offline—to sell products that drive traffic to their websites and build their email lists. Today I'll tell you what to include when mailing a product to increase subscriptions to your email newsletter.

To make sure the products you mail to your customers will drive them to your website for future sales, include:

• At minimum a mention of your website on the packaging
  
  
• An offer that contains an incentive, like a discount, for visiting the website
  
  
• The URL to your website, displayed prominently
  
  
• An insert card in the shipping box and envelopes that promotes your free email newsletter. The copy on this card should describe the newsletter as a benefit to buying the product, not a freebie open to the public.

Selling a product, even at a loss, to drive customers to your website to capture their email addresses can be a gateway to relationships that can last for years. Those relationships provide the opportunity to sell subscribers products at a higher profit margin than the original product that attracted them to your website.

To learn other ways to use retail companies to your advantage, read the Using Retail Distribution to Drive Website Traffic special report. Inside, Mequoda Chief Information Architect and Managing Director Don Nicholas describes how successful online publishers are mailing their customers physical products to drive their virtual online traffic.

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