11 Creative Ways You Can Use Autoresponders
by: Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ
1. Pick 4 or more articles you've written that have a common theme and put them in an autoresponder series. Announce it on your site as an e-mail course on the go.
2. If you have a page for related links, create a related links file and put it on autoresponder. This can be a one-page e-mail containing 15-50 links that are of interest to your visitors. Put your own promotional texts or blurbs at the top, middle and bottom of the e-mail.
3. Create a fun or trivia quiz, put it up on your site and put the answers in an autoresponder that your visitors can request. This way, you'll know the people who took your quiz.
4. Write reviews of books, music, e-books, sites, software or anything you can think of and put each review (or related reviews) in an autoresponder. If what you are reviewing have affiliate programs, use your affiliate links in the autoresponder.
5. Run a contest on your site or e-zine, then have your visitors or subscribers send their responses to your autoresponder. This way, you won't have to worry about manually sending them a confirmation receipt.
6. Create a frequently updated autoresponder and let your visitors and/or subscribers know about it. You can put in weekly tips or links to useful resources in the autoresponder and a reminder to the people who request it that you update it every week or on a regular basis (e.g. tell them to request for the same autoresponder again a week from now). You can use this method instead of using autoresponders with limited follow up messages.
7. If you've written 20 or more articles and you have them on separate autoresponder accounts, create a master list for your articles. In this master list, list the titles of your articles, their autoresponder addresses and their short descriptions. You can then just promote this master list.
8. Put excerpts or free chapters of your e-book, book or paid e-mail courses in an autoresponder series, then include your follow up sales letters at the end.
9. If you're selling your own products, put your testimonials on autoresponder, along with the description of your products, an excerpt or a free chapter. This will increase your credibility.
10. Keep track of people who download your free e-book, e-report, or free software by putting their download links in an autoresponder. When you promote your free product, you can just promote the autoresponder address.
11. Put links to your hidden pages on autoresponder. A hidden page could be the affiliate page where you have all the graphics, text links, promotional articles that interested affiliates can use. Let people know they can have free access to your affiliate page by requesting the autoresponder. This way, you can have a list of people who are interested in becoming your affiliates.
About the author:
Copyright (c) Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ
Shery is the developer of creative, motivating and fun e-mail courses for writers. Sign up and take an e-mail course today -- free! -- at http://WritingBliss.comShe also authored the e-book that lets you create your own original and profitable E-mail Workshops, eCourses and Tutorials in only 3 days! Visit http://EmailWorkshopsHowTo.comfor more info.
Autoresponders Generate Online Profits
by: Lewis Leake
If you ask online marketer how to convert website visitors into buyers, most will give you the same answer: the sales are in the follow-up.
It’s much more than just increasing your traffic volume. After all, most of your visitors won’t decide to purchase your products or your services when they first visit your website. But that’s not to say that they won’t be interested in your offer tomorrow or next week, or that they won’t be interested in future offers.
Therefore, it is necessary to get your visitor's email addresses so that you can inform them of current and upcoming offers. You do this by using an opt-in system that invites them to subscribe to your mailing list. By gathering their names and email addresses, with their permission of course, you are now able to contact them periodically with information, usually by sending them an ezine as well as an occasional freebie.
There are no problems as long as you’re only dealing with ten or twenty subscribers, as you could just email them individually. However, such numbers aren't going to make you many sales. You should aim for a mailing list that could reach into the thousands. That number of subscribers would make it difficult for you to prepare individual emails for each name on your list.
The basis of an ideal mailing list, therefore, is an effective autoresponder system that provides the power and flexibility to email your subscribers in a timely and efficient manner.
A mailing list of considerable size powered by a good autoresponder system consistently provides earnings for many Internet marketers. A lot of online businessmen make significant profits from their mailing lists alone.
Okay, but what is an autoresponder system? An autoresponder system is like a digital secretary. It takes care of your subscribers by providing an opt-in system that allows visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. An autoresponder system also takes care of the sending of emails to your subscriber base.
You can prepare your messages in advance, program them into the autoresponder, and preset the intervals by which the messages are delivered. You can even separate your subscribers into various groups. You could have a group for those who have not yet placed an order, for example. You could have another grouping for those who have already made a purchase. This allows you to use two different marketing approaches in dealing with each of the groups.
A good autoresponder system can help you build trust in your products or services. With a good autoresponder, you can also provide an efficient technical support program. If your subscribers email you a question about one of your products, for example, you could preset the autoresponder to reply with a general FAQ to send them the information.
Not all autoresponders are designed the same and much care should be taken in choosing the right one for your particular needs. Here are some questions you should ask before you decide on a particular autoresponder service:
* How many accounts can you create? Some business plans might
require that you have different accounts for different products.
* How many lists can you build? There are also some business plans where you might need different lists for different groups of subscribers.
* How many follow-up messages can you preset? Do you need a lot of follow-up messages or do you know yet? Quite a few autoresponder services provide for unllimited follow-ups.
* How many subscribers can the system hold? And also, how many subscribers can the system respond to?
* How much customization is allowed? You need to be able to personalize your email messages with each subscriber’s name and other customizable information.
* How does the system gather subscriber information? The process should be simple and convenient; otherwise, the visitor will not subscribe.
* Will you be able to send your messages in html and text formats? Most autoresponder services allow both formats.
* Will you be able to track your subscribers for the purpose of target marketing? This my or may not be important to you.
* Is the scheduling system fully automated and flexible enough for your current and future needs?
* Is the autoresponder easy to use? Do they have a demo area so that you can try it out?
Now, does the autoresponder service you are considering provide answers to all of the above questions? If so and if it is offered at a reasonable price, then you should grab the deal as soon as you can.
Remember, if you’re running an online business, a good autoresponder should be one of your primary investments. It could be the key to an excellent conversion rate, more sales and more profits.
About the author:
Lewis Leake, Jr. is the webmaster of GrowNetProfits.com - http://www.grownetprofits.com. Find out how to skyrocket your sales with unlimited, follow-up autoresponders! http://www.grownetprofits.com/SFAR
Do Your Autoresponders Drive Your Customers Crazy?
by: Silvia Hartmann
Writing chained auto-responder messages to sell a product is a good idea in principle, but in practice it can LOSE you clients just as well if you don't get right.
A chained auto-responder is a sequence of emails that gets delivered automatically when someone subscribes to this autoresponder.
It is used in marketing to deliver mini-advertisements, teaser courses, demo extracts, testimonials or stepped sales letters, and all of this is designed to get the client eventually to click on the "buy me now" link for the main product that is being promoted.
There are three main problems with chained auto-responders. Avoid these, TEST your linked auto-responders before you inflict them on the general public, and you should see significant increases in your sales.
Problem No. 1 - No Content Beyond Selling
This is THE most VIOLENTLY annoying class of chained autoresponders - message after message from the same place, trying to sell you something, in so many different words. YUCK!
What marketers who don't THINK seem to forget is that folk who own and manage PCs and email aren't that stupid.
They can read and write, you know, and they are not IDIOTS.
After two or three repeats, they will immediately delete such messages from their inbox and probably put a spam block on the sender domain for good measure.
That's not what the marketeer had in mind, I should wager ...
Problem No. 2 - Too Little Content
I remember one "mini course" which contained nothing but teasers and virtually no useful information whatsoever.
Once again, look, marketeers!
If you want people to "try" the product, you need to give them at least a little taste of it.
Don't hold the glass with the sample wine under their nose, and when they reach out, oops, that'll be $875 dollars please ... but we do have a "money back" guarantee ...
This is just ANNOYING, it's even dishonourable and an angry person does not make a good customer.
Problem No. 3 - Too Much, Way Too Much ...
I subscribed to another auto-responder teaser mini course just a few days ago, and here, the folks in charge had done a 180' U-turn on the two points above, most likely because they got it that those content less/content poor efforts don't work to sell more of their product.
In their desire to have it be known how marvellously content packed the main item was, they created this huge long document, of at least 20, 25 paragraphs for the first instalment of their chained auto-responder.
Gee.
Now I don't know about the rest of the planet, but I'm actually quite a busy person and I get STACKS of emails every day.
I try and cut down the time I spent on dealing with email because it does get out of hand, and on this occasion I was into something else anyway.
I took just *one look* at the plethora of writing and went, "Oh god, I don't have time for that right now ..." and left it.
Have you ever left a non-priority email for later ...?
Yeah, you know what I mean.
But then, the very next day, the 2nd instalment arrived. I opened it and damn me, there's another REAM of goodness knows what, but now I've missed the boat because this is No. 2 and I haven't read No. 1 yet!
I hastily closed it, feeling guilty and moved on.
But then, No. 3 arrived - another book length instalment. I just couldn't handle it anymore.
I deleted the lot.
Now that's a terrible shame because there may have been valuable information I never got, and the guys who wrote this spend AGES doing it.
So, here are my suggestion for chained auto-responders copy.
1. Head it with, "Busy? Save me! I contain important information!" or words to that effect.
2. Keep it SHORT. Pick out ONE USEFUL thing and just - tell me THAT. So I can glance at it and say, "Hey, that's useful! Cool! Thanks, guys!" When I mean short, I mean anything above three paragraphs is way, way too long for an autoresponder email in this day and age.
3. Keep it TOTALLY FOCUSSED on the product you are selling. I'm on autoresponders where you wouldn't begin to guess for all the waffle, testimonials, side tracks and "personal messages" what I'm supposed to be BUYING at the end of the day!
4. Give people a chance to keep up. Space your messages three days, don't inundate us. Or better still, test this for yourself. One hell of a lot of "internet marketing wisdom" is completely out of date now because it was researched back in the days when we got four emails a week, and not fourteen thousand each. Time has moved on and requires NEW thinking, and different strategies.
My last tip on chained autoresponders is as follows.
Subscribe yourself to OTHER PEOPLE'S efforts.
Don't look at them as a marketeer would, but as though you were a human being in front of their computer, if you know what I mean by that.
You can learn what pleases and what works, and what doesn't.
Mark out to yourself what you like and use this in your own efforts, and avoid what really turns you off.
Lastly, keep working at your chained autoresponder copy until you have something that really works, and really brings in lots more sales.
They are a great resource - if handle them right.
About the author:
Silvia Hartmann is the author of MindMillion and you can get a FREE course, delivered by autoresponder (!), the 60 Second Wealth Creator, at http://mindmillion.com/60/