To generate revenue from an autoresponder you must first know that not all autoresponders have been created equal. Deciding on what third-party email service you want to use is dependant on what you want to do with it.
Here are a few things you have to know before you choose your mail service.
What is a Autoresponder?
An autoresponder is an intricate part of your lead capture and email marketing strategy. You can live without it but it is better if you don’t. Its job it to automate your mail in and mail out. Although it doesn’t read your mind, fortunately most autoresponders are fairly simple to use.
You can use your autoresponder service to automatically add a person to a list. Even if they send you an email using your website email address. When a person sends you an email they will get an autoreply and their email is put into a specific “list”. The LIST is what you set up to send out an auto-sequence of emails designed to communicate with your prospects, customers, and leads.
This pre-written email series can deliver a training course over a period of days, deliver a sales sequence, or anything else you want it to. You only need to write your email sequences once and they will be
Lists can be narrowly segregated by your prospects specific interests as well. This ensures that you only email them exactly what they are interested in. For example, a sporting goods supplier has several promo pages for various types of sporting equipment. Hockey, tennis, golf, cycling etc. How do you know what your prospect is really interested in? A person interested in soccer won’t be interested in tennis rackets. If you mass-email everyone about your sale on hockey skates you will lose a lot of your customers not interested in hockey. They will just remove themselves from your list by clicking the “unsubscribe” link..
You can keep your customers interested, happy, and increase your store sales, by simply setting up a lead capture on each page of your site
Once you have their email address your autoresponder will jump into action. Your new customer will automatically receive what they signed up for plus be put into a followup series that is designed to guide them through a sequence of sales steps that will encourage them to make a particular purchase.
Now that you
Your autoresponder can be a prime source of income and serve as the face of your business. Because of this you need to be careful what autoresponder service you choose.
Top Five Ways to Encourage Sales Using Autoresponder Software
Make sure your emails are useful and something the reader wants to read. If all you do is send flyers and promotions they won’t stay on your list for long.
By being helpful and informative your prospect will quickly learn that you DO know what you are talking about and you will become the authority. This means when they are ready to make a purchase you will be the one they turn to for information to help them make a buying decision.
Making sales using your autoresponder is achieved in several areas, starting at the initial contact.
1. The Thank You Page – This is the one and ONLY page you are guaranteed that your prospect is going to see. Use it wisely!
By giving you their email the person has indicated they like your products. Now is a good time to present them with a low-priced offer specific to their interests. If they are seeing the thank you page because they have already made a purchase, then this is prime real estate to present an up-sell or another related offer.
2. Special Customer Discount – Mailing out discount offers or coupons (make sure they have an end date) will prompt people to make a purchase. Having a clear expiry date will inspire them to act quickly. Let your prospect know that the are receiving preferential treatment as your customer. Make sure the offers they get in their email are different than any they can find on the internet or their local newspaper.
Try putting a limit on the number of times a coupon can be used so they will share them with friends and family as a privileged member. “Only 5 Allowed” will inspire scarcity and action.
3. Deliver Paid Newsletter – Use your Autoresponder to deliver a subscription to a special business report that will give them insider information. You can also mail access to membership updates and timed release on a membership site.
4. Solo-Ads or Promotional Spot – Be careful with this one, you don’t want to spam your people. But making good offers from associated business’s that your prospects can benefit from is OK. You can get paid in a couple of ways. The advertiser pays you to mail and you could negotiate a commission on resulting sales too.
5. Mail Swaps – I don’t recommend you do this with your buyers list as a local marketer. If you are in the market to make money off your list and that was your sole purpose of building a list, then segregate your lists into niches, and responses.
Best Autoresponder Tips
When choosing your autoresponder service you need to be aware of a few things. Some of them do not allow for you to use your emails to promote affiliate offers. Make sure you read the Terms of Service you agreed to when signing up. If you violate the terms of your agreement you could end up losing your account AND all your subscribers.
CAUTION: make sure the autoresponder service you choose is reputable. They need to have a clean IP address and not be found on blacklist. Before you buy your subscription you can request what the Email Senders Score is.
Autoresponder features
a. Automated reply and pre-scheduled delivery feed – to deliver specified content or information at specific intervals.
b. The ability to real-time email. This is like sending a email from your personal account as it is written in real-time and you can send immediately if you want to. If you prefer, you can schedule these as well to be delivered on a specific day and time.
c. You can use your autoresponder with optin forms or use an email address set up with your service instead.
d. Some services will allow you to Geo-target by using the IP address they had when they signed up to your list. This way you can separate your list for special timezones as well as honouring holidays and events in different parts of the world.
e. Group send broadcasts triggered by updating your website or blog. By tying in your blog, you can notify your followers every time you post.
f. Full theme design for emails. This way you can choose to send simple text emails or really fancy magazine style ones. Most services also supply pre-built templates so you can easily be as fancy as you want to be with your newsletter.
g. The ability to choose between double and single optin. Double optin is better for cutting down on spam complaints but single optin is better for number of sign-ups. People sometimes will not click the “confirm” link sent in the second email when subscribing. If they do not confirm you cannot mail to them.
h. Passing the subscribers details to the thank you page. This way you can personalize your thank you greeting.
i. Snippets for personalization. Little shortcodes you can insert in your emails so you can pass on the subscribers name so they see “Dear Fred” using something similar to:
{!first_name}
Be cautious when using this though, be sure to read the dangers in requesting names in the post on autoresponder list building best practices.
j. Auto-segragation based on interests and actions. When someone signs up to a list they should be segregated into a specific interest group. As they continue to click on links and make purchases you can set up the autoresponder to add or move them to different lists. This way when you mail out a broadcast that only a few would be interested in, you won’t need to blast your entire list.
k. Connect your shopping cart with your autoresponder. This way when someone makes a purchase through your merchant account, their information is also stored on your email service for easy communications and notifications.
l. Tying in your social accounts so your emails will publish automatically to your Twitter feed or Facebook page.
m. Behind the scene statistics like open and click rates allow you to target email only the people who have clicked a link and re-send to those who didn’t open. Keeping track and testing your email responses, as well as testing and tracking your follow-up will help you find the weak areas so you can increase your sales and ROI.
You can also see your bounce rates as well as complaints. Find out more on best practices and why emails bounce.
