Building Interest (and Business) with Autoresponder Emails

It’s been said that a prospect must hear your message an average of seven times before making a purchase. Bit of a bummer if you only mail out once a month… so there’s a solution many email marketers use to address this - AUTORESPONDERS.  

A Sequential Autoresponder is a program designed to collect email addresses and then send out a series of pre-written messages to subscribers at timed intervals. (Note that this is completely different from the one-off autoresponders we normally set up to send “Im on vacation” messages and the like.)

Autoresponders are just plain AWESOME.  If used correctly, your autoresponder program can be one of the most powerful tools in your email marketing arsenal — allowing you to literally ”sell while you sleep.”  Once you set up your messages and your signup form, you can pretty much just forget about it. (Just make sure to check for any replies or questions they might generate.)

If you think autoresponder marketing might be a good fit for your company, here are a few tips to get you started:

• Get your signup form right.  Tell people EXACTLY what they’re signing up for, and ask only for the information you actually need (in most cases, just the email address and first name will do, but you can add more fields if you want to personalize your messages further).  Remember that the more fields subscribers have to fill up, the less likely they’ll go through with the process.

• Craft a non-threatening welcome message.  No one likes a hard sale, so just chill.  You are not meant to “score” on the first date.  Don’t try too hard, and don’t come on too strong.  The welcome message should come immediately after signup, and just … welcome.  Thank them for signing up, introduce yourself, and set some expectations.  You might also use this opportunity to ask people to whitelist your email address (i.e. add it to the email program’s address book or list of approved senders).

• Plan out your timing.  The frequency will always depend on what you have to say - and who your audience is - but in general, you want to space out your messages so you don’t end up irritating people and causing them to unsubscribe before they get to the end of the series.  It might also help if at the end of each message, you let subscribers know what’s coming next, and when.

• Start with an informative message – a message that educates the reader in some way on the topic that your product or service is related to. At the bottom of the message, include a link to the sales page for your product. Use that first message to focus on the problem that your product or service can solve, with just a hint of the solution.  

• Build up from there, moving into how your product or service can solve a problem, and then with the next message, ease into the benefits of your product – giving the reader more actual information with each and every message.

Autoresponder marketing is an art, and it may take some time to get it right - but it’s definitely worth it. If you play your cards right, by the time the potential customer reads the last message in that series, they’ll be convinced enough to make a purchase!     

It’s important to note as well that the same guidelines that apply to newsletters and other forms of email marketing apply to autoresponders too: 

• Give people a way out!  Always include an unsubscribe link in your emails. 

• Personalize.  As I’ve said before, the beauty of email marketing is that you can make a message sent to a thousand people feel like it was written for just one.  So if you have data you can use to personalize your message, use it.

• Make your message about the customer (not about you).  Focus on benefits, not features.

• Provide valuable, relevant information that subscribers can actually use - even if they don’t actually end up purchasing. If at the end of it all, all you’ve done is create awareness (and maybe a budding relationship) - that’s still success.  When time comes to actually BUY - even if it’s a month or a year later - people are more likely to purchase from a “friend” than from a stranger.

If you’d like to try out autoresponder marketing, but don’t have the software for it, have a look at Interspire’s Email Marketer, or check out Getresponse.com.  Another popular autoresponder service is Aweber.com. 

To see autoresponder marketing in action (and maybe pick up a few things along the way) you might want to sign up for this 7-day email course from GetResponse.  (You can always unsubscribe after) It’s a bit of a hard sell in my opinion, but a good guide nevertheless.