Autoresponder Lists To Email Market
February 11th 2009
Our Internet School > Website Marketing > Email Marketing
Passive income strategy 2 – E-mail marketing using an autoresponder
Most experienced online marketers know that, even if you are producing and selling your own internet marketing products online, those sales do not represent the primary profit centre of your business.
When a customer buys a product from you, and almost irrespective of how much money they spend when they do so, you have always gained something far more valuable as an intrinsic part of that transaction.
In addition to their money, you have obtained their e-mail details, and that allows you to send a continuous stream of targeted product recommendations and suggestions to that customer. Given that they have already bought a product from you, you have a clear idea of the kind of product or service that they are most interested in, and it is therefore a simple matter to put the recommendations in front of them that you already know match their requirements.
It is because of this ability to laser target your product recommendations to existing customers on your mailing list that many experienced marketers suggest that every existing customer on your list is worth an average of $1 to your business every month.
Most successful online businesses do not, however, only have one mailing list. In addition to a list of existing customers, they will spend a great deal of time and effort on building prospect mailing lists, because it is these prospects who represent the new customers of the future.
When you first start out, you have no mailing list of your own. For many new marketers, their mailing list grows slowly until they have mastered the most effective mailing list building tactics and strategies. Amongst these tactics and strategies, perhaps the most important individual aspect is to have an appropriate mailing list management system in place from the beginning. For most marketers, this means an autoresponder.
Although you will often see autoresponders defined as computer-based systems that allow you to send automatic replies to e-mails, when used by internet marketers and online business entrepreneurs, autoresponder systems are far more than a mere e-mail answering tool. Used properly, an autoresponder can become the heart of a completely automated passive income generating system the power and strength of which cannot be overestimated.
Through your marketing campaign, you bring a new prospect to your site, usually by making some attractive free gift offer. In order to get that free gift, the prospect has to give you an e-mail address to which you can send it.
This e-mail information does not, however, go to your e-mail address. Instead, because the prospect has completed some kind of subscription form on your site, and that subscription form is linked to your autoresponder account, it is to your autoresponder that the information is sent.
When it arrives, because most professional autoresponder systems use what is known as the ‘double opt-in’ system, the first response your prospect will get will be automatically sent by the autoresponder company. This message will ask them to click a link in the e-mail to confirm that they genuinely intended to complete the subscription form.
Assuming they confirm by clicking the link, they should then immediately receive a link to the promised free gift in the first of a series of preloaded e-mail messages that you have already created (or had created for you).
How many times a week to send an email marketing campaign?
Your autoresponder is then set by you to send mail to your prospect at whatever time intervals you like. Although it is entirely up to you how regularly you send e-mail to your prospects, most marketers set their autoresponder account to automatically send e-mail every two or three days.
In every e-mail message, there should be valuable and targeted free information that the prospect can use. For instance, to return to our earlier fly fishing example, your prospect signed up for your mailing list to get the promised free fly fishing report from your fly fishing website. If you send an e-mail series listing top fly fishing tips for free, you can pretty much guarantee that your prospect will open your e-mails because fly fishing is their ‘hot-button’.
Even though it is critical that you send them valuable information for free (because it is that free information that prompts them to open your mail), you should also include a product or service recommendation in every e-mail edition.
If you do this long enough and regularly enough, one of three things will inevitably happen.
Option one is that they will unsubscribe from your mailing list, and while this may initially appear to be a bad thing, it may in fact be nothing of the sort. By unsubscribing, they have clearly indicated that they were never going to buy anything from you anyway, so there is no value to your business having them on your mailing list. The sooner you remove them, the better it is.
Option two is that they simply stop opening your e-mails, and using the system recommended below, you will be able to see this happen.
Option Three and the most favored option is that they eventually buy something from you, and put money in your pocket.
However, the main point to appreciate about using an autoresponder is that whether you have 100 or 100,000 mailing list members makes absolutely no difference. You create your e-mailing series only once, and after that, the whole thing runs on complete auto pilot.
You can, of course, become slightly more involved in the operation if you want to, and this is likely to increase the profitability of this particular business model still further. For example, if you send your members an up-to-date weekly newsletter in addition to your automatic e-mails, you can keep them abreast of the latest news and introduce other product suggestions or recommendations to them at the same time.
Without any doubt, one of the best autoresponder systems is one offered by AutopilotRiches (1month trial for only$3.95),
and you use their online system to create your subscription form. They also handle all your products whether physical or electronic. You can check out an introduction to AutoPilotRiches below
The remaining hour of the video can be watched in the free members area at http://www.OurInternetSchool.com/
You then highlight your free offer in all of your promotional materials, and send all of your visitors to this ‘free gift’ signup page. People see your promotion, want to get their hands on the free gift, and are happy to ‘trade’ their e-mail details.
In this way, you build your prospect mailing list, and that list represents guaranteed passive income in the future.
You can take this a stage further by asking your site visitors to recommend your site to friends by pasting a free ‘Tell a friend’ button on another page of your site and then using your autoresponder to redirect your visitor to that page after they receive their free gift. Promise them another free gift in return for a certain number of e-mail addresses, and a proportion will co-operate by recommending you to other people they know who have similar interests.
The essence of e-mail marketing using an autoresponder is that you set it up once, and then your outgoing e-mails will turn prospects into customers by generating sales without any further involvement on your part. Could there be a more passive way of generating an income on the internet?
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