Use Autoresponders To Increase Your Sales!
We spend our energy on gaining new customers, finding new products to add to our bottom line, advertising heavily and expanding our business. This is all great, but the sad reality is that oftentimes we fail to notice one of the most important -- and profitable -- 'secrets' to running a successful online business.In fact, it's a very easy principle.
Our prospective customers forget about our businesses and our products, because we don't stay in touch with them. Instead of employing an automated follow-up system that works around the clock and converts existing prospects to paying customers, we'd rather hunt for "new blood" and spend big bucks on advertising.
In 2000 I run a website that offered an $27 ebook with information on how to start a simple website business from scratch. On the website I had a free sign-up form which allowed the visitor to read the first chapter of my ebook. All they had to do was enter their name, email address and click on "Sign Up" button, and they'd get the first chapter of my book in a few seconds.
While this worked fine and the site converted quite a lot of sales (about 1 in every 100 visitors would buy my ebook), I felt I could be doing much better if I had used a system that would automatically follow up with people who asked to receive the demo chapter of my ebook. I did not have time to do it all by hand, but I wasn't a programmer to develop such a software program on my own.
As I had very little email marketing experience, I did some research on Google and found out that the technology I was looking for was called email autoresponders.
How does that work?
The autoresponder is a special web-based software that enables you to create your own set of messages. The first message is usually the autoresponse (i.e. the message that your visitor receives immediately when she signs up). The other messages are follow-ups which are delivered over the course of the specified amount of time.
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Example:
- The subscriber fills out a form on your website and they get your first email message automatically.
- After 2 days, they get another message (your first followup) which is automatically delivered to them by your autoresponders.
- Four more messages follow over the course of next 14 days.
- The subscriber finally "gives in" to your reasoning, becomes convinced and purchases your products.
Guess what the autoresponders did for me? A month after I implemented my own follow-up system (8 messages spread out over 25 days), my sales almost tripled!
And it's not rocket science. It's common sense actually. When you see an ad or read about a company once, you're much less likely to buy the product immediately then if you've been subject to several more ads or marketing messages. The autoresponder builds up credibility, boosts customer confidence and reinforces your brand. That in turn translates to more sales. Common sense logic.
For the last four years I have become a great believer in this technology and I am convinced that the autoresponder service can increase just about any online business and make it thrive like never before.
I have tested six or seven different companies offering this service and I can whole-heartedly recommend only one: GetResponse Autoresponders.
Why did I choose GetResponse?
My primary concern when choosing an autoresponder service is deliverability of email messages.
If you are like me, you get flooded by spam email arriving in your mailbox every day. This is a huge problem for the industry. Email providers and ISPs try to counter-act this problem by implementing anti-spam filters, RBLs (real-time blackholes) and scoring spam-recognition systems (such as SpamAssassin)
While keeping spam at bay is great, the problem is the false positives (non-spam email that gets blocked by all these anti-spam barriers). Unfortunately, many autoresponders get blocked and filtered by major ISPs and email service providers (such as HotMail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Road Runner and others).
GetResponse is very serious about dealing with spam and has excellent reputation in the anti-spam community for dealing quickly with all "bad apples" (users who attempt to abuse their system). Thanks to this, GetResponse has higher deliverability than virtually any similar service on the Internet.
No matter what service you decide to choose, please remember that establishing your own follow-up sales system is one of the most effective (and most overlooked) strategies to growing your Internet business, and one that you can implement fairly easily with a service such as GetResponse.
Good luck with your marketing!
Maria Wells
(reprinted with permission)