By Andrew Grant
Welcome back to the third and final part of my introduction to autoresponders.
The results
Now remember that all of this communication with our shoe-buyer, happened automatically; all you had to do was enter her e-mail address into your autoresponder list and the system took care of the rest, but now you have a relationship with that customer.
She is reminded of your store every week; she knows what’s happening there without visiting and she now has the opportunity to come in and get sale bargains before the crowds, and a discount on her favourite range. She feels important and cared about and that is a powerful feeling.
If a market researcher stopped her in the street, next week and asked her questions about local shoe stores, who do you think she’d mention? Who do you think she’d know the most about? Your store of course! This is truly powerful stuff, which is why I’m amazed so few businesses use it.
The power of the list
Over time, you will add more and more people to your list and they will continue to receive weekly or monthly or even daily communication from you; whatever is most appropriate to your business.
Imagine that now, you have 1,000 people on your list, in the case of a local business, or maybe 20,000 for a web business and believe me, these figures are small compared to some lists. Now you have the ability to turn sales on at will.
Remember that all those people have requested to receive your communications, so they are happy to see your e-mails in their inbox and will most likely read them with interest, for as long as you keep feeding them relevant information.
You know that next week there is a new range of ‘Fabulous’ shoes coming in and you want to sell as many pairs as possible. You write a special, one-off e-mail, not part of the ongoing pre-written sequence and you send it to your list as a broadcast, which is a facility provided by all the autoresponder providers I mentioned.
Now, because you are mailing to an eager, ‘opt-in’ list of people who already like and trust you – your conversion rate will massively outstrip what you might expect from a standard blind mailing. Twenty, thirty even sixty percent conversion rates are not unheard of when the right offer is sent to a well tended list.
So you can see that taking just a little time to gather the tiniest bit of information from a prospect can pay enormous dividends by driving customers directly to purchase. The combination of a strong list and a well planned autoresponder sequence is marketing gold these days. So what’s stopping you?
E-mail Marketing - Autoresponders for Beginners - Pt 3
By Andrew Grant
If you want to learn more about autoresponse campaigns and actually see one in action while you learn, then come to my website.
I’ll leave you with one small thought. We left our shoe store owner with a great tool for encouraging local customers back to buy from him. But why stop there? E-mail can reach the entire world in an instant. If he had a website and a shopping cart, he could go into the mail order shoe business in a heartbeat and every time he wanted to boost sales he could just send out a broadcast e-mail to his loyal list and they’d be throwing their credit card numbers at him. It’s not a big leap is it?
Andrew Grant is a web entrepreneur, life coach and marketing consultant. He has written many articles on self growth and how to build a successful web business. Andrew publishes a FREE fortnightly newsletter, packed with valuable information for growing your wealth and growing your self. Visit http://www.money-and-mind.com to subscribe.
