Google AdWords™ for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Following Up with Your Prospects

In This Chapter

• Building the relationship with e-mail

• "Bribing" your visitors for their e-mail addresses

• Putting e-mail marketing on autopilot

• Staying on the right side of the spam police

Indulge me for a moment and try this experiment. Think about the Web sites you browsed yesterday (or the most recent day you were online). Roughly, how many sites were there? What were they? Take a minute and write down as many as you can remember. When you're done, open your Web browser and view your browsing history. How many sites did you forget? How many of those sites are you likely ever to visit again?

The point of this experiment: If you're anything like me, you visited a lot of sites, found some of them interesting, but got distracted and left without leaving yourself a convenient and reliable way back. Your Web site visitors are the same. You work like crazy to build a great AdWords campaign, pay real money for visitors, and most of them vanish like dust in the wind (to quote one of my favorite folk-rock songs of the 1970s).

You haven't bored your Web site's visitors, or offended them, or disqualified them. They just weren't ready to transact business with you at that moment. Or a phone call, incoming e-mail sound, fax, co-worker, daydream, flashback, or UFO sighting distracted them. What a shame, too. You spend so much time, money, and energy to get them into a sales funnel that turns out to operate more like a sieve.

In this chapter, I show you some ...