I would like to share a little secret with you that will help to maximize your return when advertising in ezines. While ezine advertising is one of the most effective and affordable ways to advertise online, if you're not using this technique, then you're not maximizing your returns.




That little secret is, drum roll please... to capture readers email addresses directly from the ad itself. Why would you want to do this? It's simple really and I'll get right to the point.

If you place your website address in the ezine ad, then a prospect that responds to your ad will logically have to click through to your web site for more information.

Advantages = You gain a web site visitor, POSSIBLY a new lead or an ezine subscriber, and if you're really good, a sale :-)

Disadvantages = While a visitor may click through to your site, there are any number of reasons that might stop them from performing the action you would like them to take. Your server might be down (unlikely but possible). You might loose the visitor straight away if they click on a banner or text link that points to another site. A simple aspect of your overall presentation might immediately repel them for reasons unknown. If the link you include in your ad doesn't take them directly to further information about your offer, then you run the risk of them losing interest in surfing your site, in order to find it in a bunch of other information. After all, Internet surfers are a hurried breed of cybernaughts. The list goes on...

BUT if you place your email address, or rather the address to an autoresponder in the ad, then not only can you deliver the information to the prospect immediately, but you've already captured their email address for additional follow up.

Advantages = You're guaranteed to get the email addresses of all interested readers, who otherwise might have visited your site and then failed to perform the desired task. You can take your time to properly introduce yourself and develop greater trust in your new lead. You can automatically introduce them to your web site, your ezine, your product or service etc in a continuous series of pre-determined emails. You've got an easy and affordable way to track your ad response rates, just check how many people requested your autoresponder. Your new lead has already received their first email from you and will be more receptive to any follow up emails you send. After all, the benefits of regularly mailing to your email list can be summed up in three simple words...

... profit, profit, profit!


UNLESS you bombard them with a continuous series of ads that is, and not valuable relationship building material. The list goes on...

Disadvantages = Your autoresponders server may be down (unlikely but possible). If you don't have a good series of follow up messages prepared, then you may loose that desired response. Really there aren't all that many disadvantages to this technique and the results of a recent series of tests I conducted show this.

I selected two ezines with very similar subscription bases (the difference was negligible in terms of testing) and of the same target market. The desired response that I wanted to achieve was to get prospects to subscribe to our daily ezine. In one ad I included an email address to an autoresponder and in the other a link to the web site. It turned out that 275 people requested the information through the autoresponder and in turn I converted 230 of those into ezine subscribers. That's a whooping 83.63% conversion ratio. The number of people who responded to the second ad was 265 and of those, 142 people subscribed to our ezine. That's a 53.58% conversion ratio.

The results showed that the autoresponder technique was producing far better results, and in a series of continued tests, it always came out on top.

Try this method the next time you place an ezine ad and you'll see the results. You can pick up a free autoresponder at http://www.getresponse.com if you don't already have one.

I'll also leave you with an additional tip before I depart. If you want to maximize your return to its fullest potential using the autoresponder technique, then deliver QUALITY information and / or incentives in EVERY follow up message that you create. By proving your new prospects with quality information or resources, you'll be developing further trust with every message you send, and your prospects will be more inclined to perform the desired tasks.