Your one-stop guide to choosing and using email autoresponders to enhance your website!

Setting up and using email autoresponders on your site is an easy way to make repeated contact with your visitors. Studies have shown that more than 60% of a site’s visitors who eventually end up buying a product or service don’t do it on their first visit. Email autoresponders are one way to make your site “sticky” — encouraging your visitors to return and make that purchase!

Benefits of Autoresponders

The benefits of autoresponders are so numerous you can’t afford to ignore them. You’ll find that you have the ability to communicate with your customers in a way that was never possible before. Internet marketing requires that you use the latest technology to interact with your customers so that they feel they are getting 100 percent of your attention.

Benefits of Automated Email

• Cost Reduction: Autoresponders reduce your costs across the board. Everything from long distance phone bills to direct mail postage in your sales and marketing department to reducing the need for additional hiring of staff for customer service and support.
• Easy to Run: The number one complaint of most business owners is their inability to be away from the business. Your business becomes so much easier to run and you don’t have to physically be there when you use autoresponders.
• Happy Customers: Autoresponders lets you serve your customers faster and more efficiently. Staff can focus on other higher-value functions that require human intervention or you can reduce the high cost of customer service representatives.
• Targeted Marketing: While building your emailing lists your prospects can be segmented according to the offers and promotions that they respond to. Once they ask or email you for a specific offer they can be put on a segmented list that identifies them, the products they want, and their personal preferences. This lets you market to your prospects more effectively, efficiently, and personally.

Autoresponders Give Your Business the Winning Edge

Autoresponders may be just what your business needs to give you the edge over your competition. By using autoresponders properly you will see your online sales profits excel beyond what you ever thought possible.

Choosing an email autoresponder…

It can be simple to set up and use an autoresponder, but choosing which one from the dozens of autoresponders that are available can be difficult. We take the drudge work out the decision process for you — we’ve searched the web for the cream of the crop and provide reviews and articles to help you make your choice quickly and easily.

Uses for email autoresponders…

• Give your visitors an easy way to receive a “printer friendly” version of your sites main sales messages.
• Send repeated messages to your visitors with reminders of what you sell and what its benefits are.
• Send a several part email course – the free email course can be a powerful incentive for your visitors to leave their email addresses.
• Collect addresses for your email newsletter which will give you periodic access to your site’s visitors. You can sell advertising in your ezine or just use it to promote your products and services.

Types of email autoresponders…

You probably wouldn’t be looking at this site if you were satisfied with the first type of autoresponder – most web hosts offer a simple autoresponder that gives one email message in response to an email to a specific email address. The problem with this type of responder is that one message is often not enough to keep the continued contact or deliver the content that you want to offer your visitor.

There are two main types of autoresponders. They each have their pros and cons.

Autoresponder services:

Autoresponder services are web based services that allow you to send a series of emails to a visitor who has either requested the email through a web-based form on you site (the service provides the html code for your site to use) or who has sent an email to a specific address the service has provided you to use.

The primary advantage of such services is that they are very easy to set up, and are very reliable. In addition, they are host independent. This means that your web host doesn’t have to allow you to run any particular services on your site to have access to all that an email autoresponder can provide.

Email autoresponder services have two main drawbacks – they can be costly, especially if you need to use an autoresponder on more than one web site, and they lack a certain amount of flexibility – whatever the service provides is what you get. There is a limited amount of customization that you can do with such a service. GetResponse or Aweber are what we recommend for most people. They have great customization, and the prices are quite reasonable. The ease and convenience are well worth the price, in our opinion.

Autoresponder programs (or scripts):

The other choice for an autoresponder is to purchase (or lease) a program or a script (usually written in perl, requiring CGI access on your server.) Several of these are available. They offer the potential for lower cost, especially if you have multiple web sites to support. (But be careful to check the license agreement. Some license agreements require an additional fee if you are going to use the program or script on more than one site at the same time.) My Favorite is: ListMailPro

 

Creating A Campaign 

The first step in creating an autoresponder course is to decide upon a subject. Your course should focus on a subject in which you have a great deal of knowledge and target your potential customers.

Once you have selected your subject, you’ll need to make a list of topics. Each topic will represent one lesson. If you have five topics, then you can offer your visitors a free course. If you have ten topics, then you can offer your visitors a free 10 course and so on.

Separate each of your topics into course lessons. Your first lesson should welcome your subscriber to your course and explain a little bit about what they are going to learn, followed by the first lesson.

The key to creating a successful autoresponder course is to provide quality information that will be of interest to your target audience. Each daily topic must contain valuable information or your reader may decide to unsubscribe. In addition, make sure you include information in regard to your course such as the lesson number, lesson title, information about your products or services and highlights of the next lesson.

Your course should identify a problem, provide advice in regard to solving the problem and provide the solution with your products or services. Keep in mind, your course should not be written like a sales letter. It must provide quality information written to teach and inform.