Email Marketing: Using Autoresponders Effectively

Back in the day when email didn’t exist, sending out a mailing to customers required an entire staff of employees. You’d have a marketing team to write the mail, a graphics team to make it look enticing, and the mail room team who would stuff the envelopes. Imagine having to pay a full time wage to that group of people just to get one advertisement out?

And you know, more than half of these letters would end up going directly into the trash without hardly a second look. Glad that’s over with for most of us, aren’t you?

But even though email marketing makes it easier and much less expensive to communicate with customers, you still have to calculate the way you use it. This is especially true if you want them to subscribe to an autoresponder so you can keep in touch regularly.

An autoresponder is a great tool! You can spend a single day loading up a bunch messages and then forget about it so you can concentrate on getting subscribers. People use autoresponders to teach eCourses, send out periodic newsletters, or just keep their customers informed of the latest trends and new products.

However, while this eliminates the need for an entire staff to send out a large mailing, you still need to keep in mind the reasons why companies had to pay a staff to do the job in the first place.

Whatever you put in your autoresponder still has to be written well. Your messages have to ooze value so those who read them will be enticed to stay in anticipation of the next message. And while you certainly could use a fancy template for your autoresponder mailings, its what you write that’s more important to making them appealing to the eye.

The key to a successful autoresponder series is transparency and honesty. People sign up expecting to get what you tell them they’ll get, so you should always deliver the goods. If you’re offering some kind of training, give it to them. If you’re promising free downloads, make sure they’re in the email.

This sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how many focus on just getting sign ups, and fail to keep them simply because they don’t follow through on the deal. They work hard at promising the moon just to get people subscribed, but can’t or don’t deliver.

So if you’re offering a “step by step” process, or a piece of software that’s supposed to do a certain task, then give your subscribers ALL the steps, and give them the complete software not just a demo or a partial tool that they’ll need to pay to upgrade. If you don’t want to do that, then tell them up front that you’re giving them the first 5 steps, or you’re giving them the first 3 modules for free with an option at the end to buy in.

One last point about delivering . . .

If you’re offering a sequence of training emails, let your subscribers know how many emails to expect and how often they’ll be getting them. Autoresponders make it very easy to do this, because you can set them to separate delivery times for any number of days in between. But it’s up to you to keep the subscribers informed of the process at the outset.

The final word about using autoresponders effectively is the autoresponder you choose to use. If you have a hosted domain with cpanel, you no doubt have some built in autoresponder scripts you can easily set up. They have your standard tools for setting up sign up forms and collecting emails, setting up a sequence for sending emails, unsubscription links sent with every email, etc..

But they often lack the ability to alert you when you’re sending out messages that might be blocked by spam filters. After all, what good is having 50,000 subscribers when more than half of them won’t ever get your email because they have a spam filter enabled that your autoresponder mailings keep triggering?

For this you’ll need an autoresponder like Aweber. Aweber is very easy to use, let’s you know the probability of your message delivery based on spam filter trigger words in each message, and has a remarkable delivery record with hard to reach email providers like AOL and Earthlink.

They charge for their services, but if you really want to be sure your autoresponder’s messages are being received, Aweber is the way to go.

So it’s good we don’t have to hire a staff to send out large mailings anymore. But that doesn’t mean you should spew out emails mindlessly. Take care in how you communicate, be honest in what you promise, and don’t abuse the privilege when people let you write. If you’re using autoresponders effectively and properly, you’ll have the long term edge to getting and keeping customers for as long as you want them.

Always remember, getting subscribers is only half the battle!