When most people think about selling products online, the first thing that comes to mind is a website, but I believe that most of the work of effective online marketing is done before the visitor ever arrives at your website.

Although website traffic is obviously necessary in order to make actual sales, the best results are achieved when your visitor has been properly prepared through multiple contacts prior to visiting your website.

It's true that much of the work of converting a prospect to a paying customer is done by a well-written sales page on your website, but conversion rates are maximized when the visitor has already been conditioned over time to know, like, and trust you before arriving at your site.

In that case, the visitor is predisposed to buy from you because of the relationship he or she has with you, so the main task that the website's sales page must accomplish is to explain the benefits that your product offers your customer, i.e. what problem it solves or prevents.

Ideally, your email communication should help prospective buyers decide whether or not to visit the website that the email message is promoting.

In some cases, your email will focus on a particular problem and drive highly targeted traffic to your website.

In other cases, where the mailing list is already highly targeted, i.e., it is made up of people with very similar interests and needs, the email doesn't need to identify a particular problem or solution because the people on that list have already been conditioned to expect to be interested in anything you're offering because of the positive, trusting relationship they have with you and also because you know what products would be of interest to that particular list.

One of the most common mistakes made by inexperienced email marketers is to have one single mailing list.

That can be okay if you're only selling one product or a series of closely related products all of which would be of interest to the same group.

Most successful Internet marketers maintain several separate, relatively homogeneous mailing lists, so that email communications can be targeted to the specific needs and interests of each particular list.

Moreover, even if you have only one product, you still may need to present that product differently to different segments of your target audience. Sometimes the same product is thought about differently by people from different backgrounds, education, training, occupation, or interests.

You may have noticed that major offline marketers of brand name products typically prepare very different commercials in different markets for the very same product, based on their demographics.

If you're offering a product to people who are already high earners, you might want your email to focus on how your product will help them keep more of their hard-earned money, whereas if you're offering the same product to people who haven't yet achieved success, you might want your email to focus on how your product will help them achieve the success that they -- believe that they -- deserve. This illustrates another reason to segment your mailing list.

If you conduct a good email campaign, making effective use of a smart autoresponder, your websites will convert much better.

Copyright 2007 Richard N. Rubinstein, M.D.