Part 9 - Autoresponders - your gateway to your customer and to the bank - PERMISSION BASED MARKETING

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest"

Benjamin Franklin

What's an autoresponder?

An autoresponder is simply an email program with brains - it's smart.

There are two types of autoresponders. The first is your typical reply that gets automatically forwarded to you when you email your friend at their office, "I'm sorry, but I'm out of the office until July the 45th. Please forward your concerns to the boss."

That's not the type of autoresponder I'm talking about.

Here's a scenario:

You visit website to check out a new product. You're not sure if you want to buy it yet. As you leave the site a window pops up and asks you if you'd like to sign up for the free 7-part mini-course the site is offering. They guarantee your email address will never be shared with anyone.

"Hmmm…" you think to yourself, "maybe I can get some free quality information out of this." So you enter your first name and email address in the boxes provided and click on the "Get Me Started Now" button.

Immediately, you are whisked away to a web page thanking you for signing up. You are told an email has been fired out to your inbox, and to check it out now.

You check. You have an email there welcoming you and telling you part 1 of the course will be emailed to you shortly.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks or so, you receive all seven parts of the mini-course, sent maybe a few days apart.

After the final part of the course arrives, you get another email telling you they'd love to stay in touch with you through their free "Hot Tips" Newsletter, which comes out periodically. They make sure you know you can unsubscribe at any time.

You really enjoyed their mini-course and now you enjoy the articles they send you. The newsletter articles give you ideas about new products you can develop. These ideas can be developed more easily by using their software product. This is the product you were initially interested in - which is why you went to their site in the first place.

One article in particular gets you excited and you decide to click on the link and try the product out. Plus, they offered you a 20% discount if you bought it today.

After you buy the software, you get an email thanking you for your purchase and telling you where to download it, and how to install it to get yourself up and running promptly.

Two days later another email arrives. It thanks you again for your purchase, and tells you were you can go to get support for the product should you need it. It also lets you know about the free users forum, where you can meet others, find out what they're doing, get fresh ideas, and ask questions.

Three days later you get tutorial emails. There are links to videos showing you how to get the best use out of your new product. These emails continue for about 3 or 4 weeks before they taper off slightly. All the while, you're still getting their free newsletter and enjoying it.

Six weeks later you get another email asking how you're doing with the product. It lets you know the company has another software product which compliments what you bought. You can download and use the trial version free.

As much as you’d like to think some really nice sales person has been staying in touch with you, the truth is that you’ve just experienced the power behind a smart autoresponder program.

With an autoresponder program, you pre-think what you would like to say to your customer and the relationship you'd like to build with them over a determined amount of time.

The emails sent out in the scenario were all pre-written. They were written once and sent out multiple times - automatically. This is a tremendous leverage of your time.

When the program received your email address, it sent out the automated emails at the intervals it was told to. It may have been told to send out each part of the mini-course every two days, or once a week, or at any interval.

The newsletter may also have been pre-written and sent out at weekly intervals. Conversely, it could be freshly written each time and "Broadcast" to everyone on the email list.

A smart autoresponder keeps you in touch with your prospects and customers, even when you're not around. It's a "set it and leave it" system, and a major player when it comes to automating your business.

Many prospects who don't buy immediately from you website may still sign up for your free newsletter, min-course, or something you're giving free and has good value.

Statistics show it may take 7 to 10 emails before a person will buy from you.

Emails are still one of the primary tools used to build relationships on the Internet with prospects and customers.

So, to make sure you understand this powerful concept: you write the message only once, instead of every time someone signs up or buys something. You let the autoresponder send out that message each time – automatically - instead of you doing it manually each time.

Can you imagine making 10 or 100 sales a day and having to confirm and follow up with every sale manually?

As a minimum, when you develop a product you need to also pre-write a thank you email with instructions to download your info product. Just plug that into the autoresponder and let it do its work.

Why do we collect as many "targeted" email addresses as possible? There's an expression that says, "The money is in the list."

Imagine developing a very popular info product that sells lots but you don't collect the email addresses of the people who buy from you. Later, you decide it's time for another product in that series, but since you don't have the addresses of the people who bought the first product, you have to start your marketing all over again.

Now, imagine you sold 3,000 copies of your last info product at $27 a piece. That's $81,000. That's excellent sales. Now, let’s say you had collected each of their email addresses and had kept in touch with them using your autoresponder.

Now you're ready to release your second product of that series. It makes sense if these people bought the first release at least some of them will buy your second product.

So, you send out an email to your list and offer them a "pre-release discount", selling it to them for $20. Even if only 210 of the 3,000 bought the follow-up edition, that's still $4,200 in your bank from only one email you sent out. You haven't even released it to the “public” yet or done any further marketing!

Now, imagine someone you know develops a product you know will interest the people on your email list. He's selling the product for $97 and will give you 50% ($47.50) as an affiliate commission for every copy you sell.

You like the product. So, you fire off an email to your list, promoting the product. Out of the 3,000 on your list 141 people buy it. You just earned over $6,500 from one email.

Now this may not be typical in any way, and you may or may not make this kind of money, but what I'm trying to show you is the power of having a list. Conversion rates can vary from 1% to 7% or more, depending on a lot of variables. By “conversion rates” I mean how many people you told about the product compared to how many actually bought it.

So how do you make the form for people to submit their name and email address to you?

An autoresponder program will automatically generate a form that asks for a name and an email address. You copy the code for this form from your autoresponder and add it to your website code - which is created by your web design software.

Autoresponders can be hosted in one of three ways:

1) You install an autoresponder program onto your computer at home and it operates like any other program on your computer.

The extreme disadvantage of this type of autoresponder, which is loaded onto your personal or business computer, is you have to physically be at your computer at home, or at the office, in order to send out a manual message (which is called broadcasting) to your email list. What if you're in another country and your computer is at home? Or, what if your computer ends up in computer hospital?

2) This is an autoresponder which is loaded onto your website hosting company's computer.

Hosting an autoresponder on your hosting company's server means you can send messages by accessing your autoresponder from anywhere in the world. The downside is you need a program or a license for each website which could get costly. Also you have to set the program up each time, unless you hire someone or the company to do it for you.  To get around this, you register one domain name and site package which hosts your autoresponder program. You change the email “from” field to reflect the site you are sending emails from. The great advantage of this type of autoresponder is it gives you great flexibility and no recurring monthly fees. This is what I use.

3) This is an autoresponder service you pay a monthly fee for.

GetResponse.com, aweber.com, prosender.com, and 1ShoppingCart.com are such services.

This type of autoresponder charges a monthly fee but gives you similar access from all over the world. The advantage of a service is you don't need to install a new autoresponder program each time you develop a new website. The disadvantage is you have a monthly fee and that if the company goes down, or bankrupt etc., so does your list. You can, however, export your list and back it up on your computer.

The autoresponder I chose to use is the one you load onto your web host server. AutoResponsePlus is one of the most widely used autoresponder programs on the Internet.

When you visit their site you'll get to see their pop-up box asking if you'd like to receive their free 7-part mini-course on how to use an autoresponder. I would highly recommend you signing up for it if for no other reason than to see how an autoresponder works. The information they give you is excellent.

There are many autoresponder companies, each with different fees.

1ShoppingCart.com are more than just an autoresponder company—they are also a shopping cart service to help you set up and sell your products online, especially if you sell multiple products. They give you a ton of tools to help you develop your business.

Each type of autoresponder has its own pros and cons and you need to decide what's best for you.

So, why did I choose to go with a "server based" autoresponder (AutoResponsePlus)?

To be honest with you, I used to subscribe to an autoresponder service. However, I'm one of those guys who likes to be in control of everything I do - as much as possible.

While these services are superb, and thousands upon thousands of marketers use them, I didn't like being told that each email message I wanted to send had to be approved first before I could send it. (They do this to protect the email recipient from being spammed by you, and also to protect themselves. There are strict laws against spamming and disobedience comes with disasterous consequences.)

I also didn't like having to pay a monthly fee. With AutoresponsePlus I only had a one-time purchase price (it was less than $200). They installed it for me as part of the purchase price.

I have no monthly fees other than my webhosting account, and I say what email content I send and when I send it. It will even track how many people actually opened my email from each email campaign. This is how you can find out how many emails are being blocked by filters.

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