15 Creative and Profitable Ways to Use Autoresponders

November 17, 2008

An interested visitor who has been strolling through your site has finally come to just what she is looking for and is about to make a purchase. It’s a sunny afternoon, and her cat, who happens to be sitting on the moss under the visitor’s large fifty-year-old snow-rose bonsai tree, suddenly jumps down, and the priceless tree topples over.

In the blink of an eye, your visitor exits your site, and your sale is dust - unless you have had the foresight to utilize an autoresponder that has captured her email address. If you have installed an autoresponder, you can then follow-up with her, and in all probability, make the sale when the poor woman has finished repotting her precious bonsai.

Autoresponders are remarkable, versatile programs that do so much more than just automatically answer your email. Here are a few ideas that will help you to creatively and productively use your autoresponder to transform the casual visitor into a profitable customer. Use your autoresponder to:

1. Publish a newsletter. Certain quality autoresponders will manage subscriptions and follow-up with interested prospects. Your newsletter can keep your visitors informed about your services or products, while building your reputation as a credible expert in your particular business.

2. Publish a newsletter only for your affiliates. Inform them of current sales you are running and of promotional material that your affiliates can use themselves to increase their commissions. Include tips, advice, and techniques that your affiliates can use to successfully go out and promote your business.

3. Write reviews. Cover books, software, music, e-books, movies, etc., and put each review in an autoresponder. Review your affiliate programs, using a link to your affiliate’s page in your autoresponder.

4. Distribute your articles. Writing and distributing targeted articles is a powerful tool to build your business credibility, bring traffic to your site, and increase your sales potential. If your articles contain valuable information, many editors will print what is known as a resource box for you. A resource box contains your bio and a brief description of your service or product. It can also contain your autoresponder address. Let’s say you’ve written fifty articles. Put them on separate autoresponder accounts and create a master list that contains the titles of each article, the autoresponder address, and a brief abstract. Then promote your master list. Additionally, include your publishing guidelines so your affiliates can add their articles to your list, increasing the number of writers who are represented in your article list.

5. Create mailing lists. Inform subscribers to your articles when you’ve written new ones that they may want to publish in their own newsletter or website.

6. Automate your sales process. Use an ad to insure repeated exposure of your message, which has been proven to effectively increase sales. In your ad, put your autoresponder address where a visitor will be exposed to numerous marketing materials. This multiplies the chances of converting visitors into customers. For example, if you’re selling a particular product, put testimonials about how spectacular it is on your autoresponder, and add a detailed, enticing description of your product.

7. Distribute advertising. Let’s say you sell advertising on your website or in your newsletter or e-zine. Set your autoresponder to send the information about rates and how to place an ad automatically to all prospects’ email addresses. Then have your autoresponder follow-up. It can also send notification of any special deals you are currently offering.

8. Distribute an email course. Each day, have your autoresponder send out another lesson. Just be sure that each lesson has quality content - not a sales pitch. Your content will do the selling for you, and will do it much more effectively. You can include tips centered on a different topic for each lesson, illustrating how your product will benefit the reader. Include the tangible benefits the visitor will reap by purchasing your product. Make sure to include a paragraph or two at the end of each lesson enticing your prospect to consider making a purchase.

9. Automate a reminder about your service or product after a visitor has completed your course. This will increase the possibility of sales from visitors who have taken your course but are dragging their feet about actually making a purchase. You can also use these reminders to promote new products or services, and the products and services of your affiliate programs.

10. Distribute free reports. This gives your visitor an idea of the type of information you can provide and the quality of your product or service. Make sure these reports are not sales letters or you will more than likely lose a potential customer than gain a sale.

11. Create trivia quizzes on your site and place the answers in an autoresponder. Your visitor will then be motivated to request your autoresponder, and you will have a record of the visitors’ email addresses who took your quiz. Or create a contest and have any visitors that enter send their responses to your autoresponder. Your autoresponder can be set-up to send them a confirmation of their entry.

12. Offer a trial version of your product. Give your prospects a sample of your ebook, course, software, membership, etc. People who are exposed to a little taste often end up wanting the whole pie. You can also capture their email addresses when you offer them a free trial from your website. Set up your autoresponder to give instructions on how to obtain their free trial, and then make sure to follow-up to try and close the sale.

13. Link to hidden pages on your autoresponder. For example, a hidden page could be your affiliate page that contains graphics, promotional articles, and text links that interested affiliates can make use of. Inform visitors that they may have free access to your affiliate page by simply requesting your autoresponder. You will then gather a list of visitors who may be interested in becoming your affiliates.

14. Use an autoresponder on your order page. Post a request form for visitors to be notified of special offers or discounts in the future. This creates a very effective mailing list that contains the names of people who are already your customers.

15. Put your links page on your autoresponder. It should contain up to fifty links that would be of particular interest to your visitors. Make sure to add your own promotional copy at the top or bottom of this page.

Now that you have proof that autoresponders can be used creatively, see if you can come up with some brilliant ideas of your own!

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

All About Auto Responders

November 13, 2008

All About Auto Responders

Autoresponders are an effective internet tool to help with your business promotion. Although the technical name is an autoresponder, other known names include auto email, mailbot, and email responder. Using an autoresponder will enable to save an enormous amount of time by providing automatic response through emails.

Autoresponders can vary from messages that go through email to scripts that are programmed to run on servers. All types of autoresponders work the same, as they will automatically send a message out when a message is received. Depending on the message they receive, they will send out the correct return message. This can be determined by the script or the email address.

Using an autoresponder service is a great resource to use for assisting with your routine business responsibilities because they do most of the work for you. Unfortunately, even though they are remarkable promotional tools, people also abuse the usage of them on the internet. If you are not careful, they can also be quite disastrous on those who happen to come in contact with them.

Make sure not to give your autoresponder address out when you go to a website search engine, directory or retail site. Most of these websites use autoresponders themselves, when they send out their messages. When one of their autoresponder sends out a message to your autoresponder address, it will continue going on back and forth, which is very frustrating.

That is why it is important to use your own email address and not your autoresponder when responding to things such as a email newsletter. People that use their autoresponder to subscribe often end up having their subscription cancelled. To be fare, it’s understandable that it is highly unproductive to send out emails that keep bouncing back and forth between autoresponders. That is why it is always a good idea to never subscribe to anything on the internet with your autoresponder address.

One disadvantage to consider, is with subscriptions groups or ezines, it can be very hard to locate someone who is using an autoresponder. Many times, people using an autoresponder will not have the same reply or email ’from’ address that they originally had. This can take a lot of time and effort to effectively locate the correct address.

But, if you don’t use your autoresponder to annoy others by signing up for email subscriptions, then it should treat you well. As mentioned previously, an autoresponder can help your business by saving you both time and money. They are easy to use for anyone with an internet based business, so you do not need to be technologically savvy to have one. For the price they cost and how easy they are to operate; autoresponders are great because they can help to increase your business traffic to a much higher level than ever before.

Autoresponder Marketing Techniques

November 11, 2008

Marketing Techniques Using Auto Responders

The Internet offers many means for an affordable online marketing business by using autoresponders. Let’s take a look at some of the effective ways to use them.

Article Directories Some webmasters will set up links or article directories on their sites. They create a directory on a specific industry topic, placing their own ad or banner along the top. Webmasters can use this to invite users to their website through link exchanges, which this will increase your listing awareness. Or they invite articles to be submitted that include a resource box at the bottom of each website with a link to the author’s website. Autoresponders increase website traffic, as sites link up across the World Wide Web. If you want to research this further, you can use your favorite search engine to help provide additional information on how to do this.

TEACH A COURSE You can offer your customers an easy step-by-step course, to better help them learn more about the area you are marketing. This can be an effective way to increase your business, especially if you use email auto responders and add advertisements throughout the course, in order to entice them to purchase your product or re-visit your website in the future. You can use a computer program to automatically answer marketing emails and web hosted newsletters, this is called an, ’autoresponder’ and they can be very simple or quite complex. As people sign up, they will learn more about the products and services through the teaching series.

Research has shown that the average customer may need to see your ad between 7 - 12 times before they make a decision to purchase it.

That is why an autoresponder is so essential for any online business and it is important to compare autoresponders before purchasing, in order to find the best one for you.

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