Why Use an Autoresponder?
Autoresponders never tire of doing their job. When you insert a series into an autoresponder you are addressing all of the major obstacles to marketing success in one pass.
- Most people do not order a product or service the first time you present it to them. An autoresponder lets you get your sales message in front of the prospect multiple times.
- Since your goal is to keep your messages short, you may not be delivering enough information in any one message to convince the prospect to buy.
- Autoresponders enable you to reveal more and more about the product or service as the campaign unfolds.
- Using an autoresponder to handle your mailings frees your time to focus on other aspects of building your business.
- Prospects who do not have the money to spend on your offer at the moment won’t forget about how much they want it if you keep the offer in front of them.
- Prospects who are comparing your product or services to others won’t forget about you during the decision process.
- Keeping your company name in front of a prospect builds brand awareness.
- Regular communication helps to build trust.
Maximizing Your Autoresponder Use
Whenever I walk into the convenience store around the corner from my home, or into my local neighborhood bank branch, I am always greeted by name. The people know me there and they use my name to demonstrate how much they appreciate my business. It makes me feel important even though I know that I am just one of many customers that pass through their doors every day.
It’s easy for a merchant to remember the names of their customers and to use those names in conversation. But did you realize that it’s just as easy to remember your on-line customer’s name, as well as other personal details, and use all of that information in your e-mail communications?
“Smart” autoresponders can be set up to use a person’s first or last name as well as any other personalized information that you’ve collected during the sign-up process.
Autoresponders can do this because the database table that the autoresponder uses contains a record for each subscriber. Most professional-strength autoresponders, such as, 1 Shopping Cart have additional fields that can be used to store any type of personalized information that you want for each subscriber.
When the autoresponder is running it substitutes special codes that you place into your e-mail message with the corresponding information that it finds in the table for that subscriber. Let’s look at an example:
Dear !fname
Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. You will be hearing from me often so expect to hear about all the great deals and discounts that others don’t know about on a regular basis !title !last_name,”
If you examine the above example carefully you’ll see certain codes that begin and end with a exclamation (!). If your autoresponder database has the subscriber’s first and last name, their preferred title, and the name of the city they live in, creating a personalized e-mail message like this one would be a breeze to do.
Why bother with this type of personalization? Not only does personalization create a feeling of connectivity between the reader and you, but using personalization has proven to increase response rates by an order of magnitude in study after study.
And it’s not only names and cities that are candidates for personalization. You can use your autoresponder to create subscriber-specific fields that translate into account numbers, product descriptions, special offers segmented by region, age, etc., or nearly anything else that you want your customer to see.
The uses for personalization are limited only by the power of your imagination.
This article is an excerpt from our course Follow-Up Profits Revealed , which contains a much more in-depth discussion of followup techniques and procedures, including the use of email autoresponders.
