Automate your email business with an Autoresponder
Do you send newsletters at a regular interval? Do you have a method to touch base with your customers and leads and remind them that you are eager to help them with your products? How do you collect and organize new email addresses/leads? And what about an easy way to send out a broadcast to all your potential new customers?
These are major hurdles for some companies. You have to collect the names and email addresses. You have to keep track of what you sent them and when. And forget about doing a follow-up to a segment of the broadcast (such as everyone who opened the email and yet another message to all those who did not open theirs). Do you even know who opened the email you sent? The answer might surprise you.
If you haven’t gotten totally depressed by now and clicked out, here’s a solution that will take care of all of the above and more. It’s called an autoresponder. You may have heard this word before. You may wonder what it means. You may have even used one before. A good autoresponder (AR) can make your communication business a lot easier. It can bring in a lot of business too. And best of all, it’s inexpensive (we love that word). You just need to understand a little bit more about it and how it works. So here goes.
Very basically, an autoresponder is an email application or utility that can automatically collect email addresses of those who visit your website, and send them scheduled emails in response. Some of the most popular are iContact, Aweber, Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Your autoresponder lists are made up of people that you can easily organize and re-use. You can enter all of your customers and leads into the program and use the AR to send out your newsletter at a scheduled time to all your customers or visitors to your website or store.
Here’s an example: Super Windows sells windows and they have a website, and on this website is a sign-up form. The form asks the visitor if they would like to receive their very interesting and informative newsletter. They click the form and enter the required information, usually their first name and their email address (email address is mandatory). Now their information is automatically entered onto one of Super Windows’ AR lists, such as their Newsletter List. In this example the AR is set to send a pre-composed thank you email out immediately saying thanks for subscribing with some additional information about their company. There might even be some other call-to-action in the email. In addition Super Windows set up another AR email that goes out automatically in 7 days from the time the subscriber signed up. This email might mention a sale on windows, with links to buy the item from their website or store. Get the idea?
All this happens without doing any further work. And it will do this for everyone that signs up for the newsletter. When you use an autoresponder, your list grows bigger and bigger and you have a much larger audience to sell your products to. And each month it will send out your pre-composed newsletter. (Research an actual autoresponder)
The looming question is “Why not send your emails out yourself?” Or use some broadcast service to send your messages? The reply to that is somewhat lengthy, but here is the short answer.
Deliverability rate shows how much of the email you send out actually gets to the recipients. If you send a large broadcast from your email program, some servers automatically spam it, meaning they won’t even see your message. Good AR’s have excellent deliverability ratings. Look for AR’s that have a deliverability rating of at least 98%, meaning at least 98% of the sent emails get through. Another feature of a good AR is that they will tell you in advance what the chances are of your email message being spam. It takes me 10 seconds to run a Spam Check, so I never send out a poorly received email.
Who opens your emails? Most people don’t have a clue how many people opened their emails. Or what link in the email they clicked on. This is valuable information. With Tracking Analytics you might change your subject line to get more people to open your broadcasts. You might emphasize a certain product because more people click on that link. Or re-write an offer because no one clicks the link. There is a lot of power in tracking your email messages. This feature alone is a good reason to start using an autoresponder. (Learn more about Tracking – click and scroll down to Tracking)
Survey information attained from your lists is money in the bank. Ever wonder what type of visitors come to your web site? Or what they would like to see there, or more importantly, what do they want to buy? Or what they don’t like? These are questions a survey can answer. Some AR’s offer survey forms at no extra charge. They are customizable and really easy to make and insert into your website. And they collect all the answers and report them back to you. Extremely handy, and very versatile.
Collecting and entering all of the contact information can be very tedious, not to mention setting up a routine to respond to their subscribing.
Making separate groups or lists can take a lot of time.
Mailing to these lists can take even more time.
Can you automatically link your email messages to your social web sites?
Which autoresponder do I prefer? I used one the aforementioned AR’s for over a year. It was very good, yet I didn’t use it much because I found it cumbersome and illogical. Then I switched to iContact. iContact has a simple, logical interface and I can understand it much better. Therefore I use it more, which translates to better profitability. A tool is just that, something to make your job easier and faster. And iContact has accomplished just that.
iContact just has 5 tabs – Home, Contacts, Create, Send, Track. You probably can already see how to use these tabs. And they have a MessageBuilder™, so you don’t have to know HTML code to create your messages, with plenty of beautiful attention-getting templates.
I won’t go over any more of the features and benefits, but you can take a look for yourself. There are lots of video tutorials to watch before you sign up. And you can sign up for a 30 day free trial to see if you like it. Give it a try. You’ll never turn back.
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