Forms: The next level in e-mail communication!
By Raphael Pirker

Everyone knows that communication is an essential part when you
want to make profit online. It sometimes takes up to 10
follow-ups through e-mail to actually make a sale from your
site, since the visitor has the choice between many similar
products or services. I've seen people provide a link to their
e-mail address and wait for the questions to roll in. Are you
doing the same? Then consider changing that rapidly. Why? There
are 8 reasons why you should switch to Forms right now:

1. The Forms are easier to fill out for your visitor
2. The visitor can ask his questions more targeted sine Forms
limit the questions he can ask
3. You can answer the questions more quickly because the
questions are more specific and structured
4. Forms allow you to track what questions are asked more often
than others because Form-inquiries can be archived more
easily in databases than plain e-mails
5. Thanks to Forms you can have different types of inquiries
sent to different e-mail addresses all on one Form. This
allows you to assign each question to a certain category and
respond accordingly
6. Forms can build the Subscriber-base of your
products-announcement newsletter. How? Have you ever seen
those "Yes, I want to receive product updates" questions
inside Forms?
7. Because Forms require the user to be specific, in some cases
you can answer the questions, point to FAQs or simply notify
that you'll be answering his request shortly using
Autoresponders
8. Personalization accompanied with Automation. While there are
many e-mail Autoresponder systems available on the market,
which one allows you to address the visitor with his name?
Or furthermore, which one gives you the opportunity to use
any other information of the actual inquiry in the
Autoresponder? Any simple Autoresponder that works together
with a Form can do this and more!

You can see that Forms are a great way of growing your business
and managing your time efficiently. But there's one thing worth
considering when deciding whether to use Forms or not: In order
for the Forms to be really efficient, you need them to be
processed through CGI. But no need to worry if you don't have a
CGI bin! I will list a CGI script which you can install on your
account (if you have CGI capabilities) and give you the link to
the service created for people without CGI bin.

Matt Wright's FormMail [free]
A very powerful CGI script which has many customization
features and loads of security measurements. It is easy to
install, the documentation is very helpful and you have the
ability to run an unlimited amount of Forms through a single
script.
Link: http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml

Whiz-Mail [free]
Allows you to do the same even when not having access to a CGI
bin. How does this work? The service is remotely-hosted, so
you can host it from virtually anywhere, no matter if you have
CGI access or not. The Form remains on your site and after the
submission, the user will return to your page. You can
completely configure the way the service should act. You can
add Autoresponders and implement subscription management into
your Forms (as mentioned in reason #6)
Link: http://www.whiz-mail.com

Whether you use the Script which is hosted on your server or
you make use of the remotely-hosted service, it is essential
that you automate the task of customer-satisfaction to the
greatest without losing a lot of personalization on your site.
Personalization is a key factor to the success of your business
- online and offline.

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