Email Marketing using Auto Responders.

Sales letters through your letter box are hated by everyone. It’s unwanted, uninvited and fills your re-cycling bin. But it’s pretty clear that it’s also incredibly popular with advertisers. Why? Because while most potential customers throw away their junk letters with barely a glance, enough take action to make it all worthwhile.
They do buy—and in high enough numbers to more than cover the cost of those who don’t.

Email marketing is pretty similar, but with one important difference: on the Web, you can only send marketing emails to people who have already chosen to receive them. A bit tricky!

On the other hand, because those people have already chosen to receive your emails, you can be confident that they’re going to be interested in them.

So how do you get these valuable e-mail address?

Email is still the most popular and most used application on the Internet. It’s also an efficient means of distributing your message to large numbers of people who have requested that information. As a form of marketing, it generates high response rates—and gives you measurable results with instant feedback.
But because email marketing’s been so abused, it’s just not accepted any more to send emails to people who haven’t chosen to receive them. Break that rule, and there’s a good chance you’ll be out of business. That gives you the problem of building up a list of willing subscribers.

When you’re first starting out, there’s often a temptation to simply purchase an opt‐in email list. Lots of people sell them and you can easily pick up a million or so addresses for just a few pounds. But while that may appear to be a fast, easy way to build up customers, the names on the list may not be up to date, or even opt‐in contacts at all. You could well find yourself inadvertently spamming and it only takes one person to complain to the right people and you could be in trouble.

Similarly, there are also programs that surf the Net, recording every email address they find. These will let you quickly build up a huge list of e‐mail addresses—none of whose owners will thank you when you fill their inboxes with marketing material. Forget about them; they’re not worth the effort. It’s much safer, and much more effective, to take the time to build your own list.

One of the most successful methods is the double opt‐in technique. In double opt‐in a user elects to receive e‐mail newsletters or standalone commercial messages from you. A confirmation e‐mail is sent to that user, who is not required to take further action to be included on the list. The confirmation e‐mail includes an opportunity to unsubscribe or opt out.

Although, the double opt‐in techniques runs the risk of losing subscribers during the confirmation process, it gives the subscribers more control and thus, has proven to be more successful.

The best way to build your opt in list is to offer something for free on your website like an e‐book or some great info in a newsletter. Whatever it is, you must ask for their details before they can get it.

Automation of your Email marketing process is crucial for the success of your business. An automated system enables you to reply immediately with solicited information. You can also send follow ups to your prospects, and save lots of time.

This is where the auto‐responder comes in handy. It automatically sends a reply with a pre‐designed response to any email address that sends email to it. Auto‐responders are great for confirmation messages as well.

So what’s great about an auto-responder?

The auto‐responder allows you to capture the email addresses of your visitors, so you can build your own opt‐in targeted mailing list.
You can offer, via auto‐responder, a free article or newsletter to your new subscribers.

The auto‐responder will automatically extract the prospects name and use this information in your follow‐up messages. With this marketing tool you can send personalised follow‐up messages. If you personalise an email message, your prospect is twice as likely to buy from you.
You can sell your products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the help of an auto‐responder. The Auto‐responder is a handy tool that automatically follows‐up with a series of email messages at preset time intervals and works for you 24 hours a day. You will be able to develop your follow up messages and set reliable time intervals.
Following up with your prospects could mean a 50% increase in your sales. Your potential customers may simply forget about your initial message or they simply may have a bad day; for that reason, it is so important to follow up with your prospects at specific time intervals at least five times after sending your initial message. You know what they say! You have to get in front of your audience at least 7 times before they will buy from you! I have had people buy from me sooner but rarely the first time.

Auto responders are great for sales letters. You can post articles and blogs to forums and newsgroups, you then offer a free report about your industry and included in that you could have a sales letter. You then post the email address of your auto responder and within seconds the user could be reading the free report and your sales letter. You don’t have to do anything.

Apart from these, Auto responders also allow you to set up predefined answers to the most likely questions. This can cut up to 70% of your customer service requirements.
Given below are some of the other key benefits of Autoresponders:

1. They introduce your business to the prospective customer
2. List out special offers for members
3. They can list the benefits of joining your website
4. You can compare your product or service with your competitors
5. Give testimonials of existing customers
6. Welcome letters for new members
7. Thank you messages for new orders
8. Order confirmation
9. Acknowledgement of a query or a receipt of payment from your customer
10. A reminder when their subscription or free access period is about to expire.

It is a good idea to have a copy of the original email sent to the auto responder forwarded to you. Some people don’t understand exactly what to expect from the auto responder and they put a message inside the body of the email. If you don’t at least take a peek at these emails, you may accidentally ignore a question from a prospective customer.
Auto responders can handle many more emails than you could ever process manually. Also, you can send a ten‐page email just as fast and easily as sending a two paragraph email.

The Auto‐responder I use is Aweber, but there are many out there.

Just remember that the autoresponder is only doing what you should be doing anyway so instead of doing things over and over again yourself, do it once in your autoresponder program and you never need to do it again.
Author Pat Sutton – Professional Blogger on Internet Marketing and Personal Development, http://www.patsutton.com