12 Creative Uses for Autoresponders

In an earlier entry, I shared a list of autoresponders and their pricing that was created by a LinkedIn member. So to follow up, I recently came across this article about autoresponders and some uses. I plan on utilizing some of these tips and I hope my readers enjoy them also. Thanks for sharing your ideas and suggestions, Debbie.

Autoresponders and a Few Creative Usesby Debbie Ray

If you've been online for any period of time and have been trying to do everything on your web site all by yourself I'm sure at one time or another that you've reached a point of exhaustion just trying to keep up. Just how do those other companies keep up? The regular amount of email alone can threaten to bury you alive every single day - not to mention take away your important time to do all those other important internet "chores" that you need to do.

People expect prompt replies to their email inquiries from your internet business. This poses a major problem for you. Unless you can hire plenty of people to constantly monitor and manage your incoming emails or have figured out how to work continual twenty-four hour shifts (with no sleep) things don't look good.

Email is an essential part of your business. That can't be disputed. Email is an excellent marketing tool - it is inexpensive and it is fast. It can also be a major time waster. If you spend all your working hours answering that mountain of email, when will you have the time to complete your other business activities?

So, is there a way to overcome this huge time waster of basic email maintenance? I do have one major suggestion for you - how about the use of autoresponders responding to your emails? Basically, autoresponders are programs that automatically respond to your emails without you having to do anything (once they've been set up). Autoresponders are often inexpensive, and sometimes free. What these programs do is automatically respond to incoming emails as soon as they are received by the system.

Autoresponders can do so much more than just answer your email. They can also send information about your services, products and price lists to your customers. You could also set up an autoresponder to do more than simply send out standardized messages - such as an unlimited number of follow-up messages sent at predetermined intervals of time.

There are many companies that offer autoresponder services free of charge. Go to Google, look for autoresponders, and you will find a long list of companies offering autoresponder services for you to choose from. Autoresponders are very versatile programs that do a lot of work in no time at all. Below I'll list a few ideas that will teach you to use your autoresponders and to transform a casual visitor into a profitable customer.

1. Create various mailing lists. Tip: Inform subscribers about your new articles when you've written them.

2. Write your own reviews. You could review software, books, music, e-books or movies and put each review in an individual autoresponder. Tip: You could also review your own affiliate program if you have one.

3. Publish your own newsletter. Many autoresponders can manage your subscriptions and follow-up with interested prospects. Tip: Your newsletter can keep your visitors informed about your services or products and build your reputation as an expert in your particular field.

4. Publish an affiliates only newsletter. Inform them of current sales, promotional materials, etc. Tip: Include advice or techniques that they could use to successfully promote your business.

5. Distribute your own valuable articles. Tip: Writing and distributing your own targeted articles is a very powerful tool to build your business online credibility, increase your sales potential and bring a lot more traffic to your site.

6. Distribute your own free reports. Tip: This could give your visitor an idea of the type of information you provide as well as the quality of your products and services.

7. Distribute your own email course. Tip: Each day your autoresponder could send out another new lesson, full of quality content - not just a sales pitch.

8. Once a visitor has completed your email course, automate a reminder about your products and services. Tip: You could also use these reminders to promote new products or services.

9. Automate your own sales process. Tip: Create an ad filled with numerous marketing materials which will increase the chances of converting visitors into customers.

10. Distribute your own advertising to future clients. Tip: If you sell advertising on your website, newsletter or e-zine, set your autoresponder to send the advertising rates (and how to place an ad) automatically to all your prospects' email addresses.

11. Create your own trivia quizzes or contest. Tip: Place the answers and confirmation of their contest entry in an autoresponder.

12. Offer a sample version of your own products. Tip: Give your customers a sample of your own ebooks, courses, software, etc.

Autoresponser allow you to automate many parts of your marketing campaign. Autoresponders are potentially a very powerful marketing tool and allow you to make contact with thousands of potential customers with no work on your end - past the initial autoresponder setup.

This could be an invaluable asset considering how many potential customers you usually have contact with BEFORE you make an actual sale. Now that you have a few new ideas about autoresponders, see if you can come up with some brilliant and creative autoresponder methods of your own!


Copyright 2007 • Debbie Ray. All Rights Reserved

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Debbie Ray, owner of http://www.the-website-doctor.com/ , http://www.cheap-legal-help.com/ , http://www.profitwithinternetbusiness.com/ and http://www.total-german-shepherd.com/ is a lifelong dog owner, teacher and internet business owner. Want to learn more about internet business? Purebred dogs? Let me teach you.

Email Campaign Providers--Take your pick!

I am in the beginnings of starting an email newsletter and was researching the best autoresponder to go with. I got this information off of LinkedIn. I was so awed by his details that I thought it was a definite plus for my readers. He even lists the cost of each provider. Thanks, Ethan, for detailing this for someone searching for an Email Campaign provider.

As far as email service providers go, here's a breakdown:

AWeber: The industry leader in autoresponders and also one of the most reliable and economical email service providers. The interface is on the lo-fi side and there is less hand-holding than with Constant Contact, but if you don't require that, they are potentially the best option. They, like most of the options have a very high deliverability rate, plenty of templates and successful email marketing tutorials. $19.95 per month with no setup fee. This covers 10,000 subscribers and you can email them as much as you like. Each extra 10,000 subscribers is $9.95 per month.

Constant Contact: Very customer friendly and non-technically-oriented. Lots of templates and tools and online assistance to help you succeed with your email marketing. $15 per month gets you 0-500 subscribers with unlimited emails. The pricing scales from there, with 10,001 to 25,000 email addresses costing you $150 per month.

Get Response: Another non-techy option similar to Constant Contact. $17.95 per month for 10,000 addresses. $4.50 per month for each 5000 addresses over that. Unlimited emails and campaigns.

Campaign Monitor: A very polished, slick aesthetic earns this one all the kudos from the design crowd. Many good tools and templates to help with your email campaign's success. They use a price per email model instead of a total subscriber model. You pay $5 for each campaign and then 1¢ per recipient. You can get discounts of up to 50% by pre-purchasing email credit.

SparkList: This is the hosted service of Lyris, the makers of one of the more high profile email marketing software systems, ListManager. It is much more expensive than the others but carries the Lyris brand behind it and is much more suited to high volume emailers. It also offers a familiar interface if you are already using ListManager somewhere else. $175 setup, $100 per month for 5000 email messages up to $500 setup and $1000 per month for 500,000 messages.

A very important consideration given if you have an existing email list has to do with importing the list into their system and opt-in confirmation. In order to maintain the positive nature of their relationships with the ISPs, these email service providers want to make sure that you have obtained permission to send email to these addresses. If they require you to re-confirm the opt-in status for each email address, they will send a new request to the address. Since roughly 50 to 60% of email subscribers never confirm their subscriptions, this will erode a fair bit of your list. However, many of these people were probably not receiving/viewing your email anyway, given that they did not respond to the confirmation request.

AWeber: Re-confirmation is required. Each email address will receive a customized message asking them to re-confirm permission. Constant Contact requires you to state that the list is permission based and they will penalize you if your bounce/spam numbers get too high. They offer a free 60 day trial of up to 100 email addresses. Campaign Monitor requires you to state that the imported email addresses are 100% permission based, they were not purchased and they were not scraped from emails/websites. SparkList also requires that a re-confirmation email to be sent to each address. Get Response will also not require that you reconfirm each email's permission.

More info and vendor links at Ethan Pierse's website below.
http://www.advenir.com/internet-marketing/internet-marketing-resources.html...