Imagine for a moment, you must contact every potential customer you have a minimum of seven times before you can make a sale … What’s the best way to do it? … By mail, by advertising, or by email?
If any part of your business is on the web, I’m betting you said “email”. It’s pretty obvious; email costs much less than traditional advertising, and even if you sent seven first-class form letters through the post office, it would cost you $3.08 … per customer!
Maybe $3.08 is not so bad if you knew you were going to make $10, $20, or $100 per customer. But you don’t! Furthermore, if you had 100 customers, that’s 700 letters you have to print, fold, stuff in an envelope, address, and haul to the post office. Of course, there are mail order houses that will do this for you for a fee, but email is faster and it’s free.
Of course, email does have it’s shortfalls too. Imagine you had to write seven emails to inspire a potential customer to buy your product or service. Now, imagine you have 1,000 potential customers, or better yet, 10,000 potential customers. All you have to do is write and send 70,000 emails!
Obviously, you could write seven form letters. Now, all you have to do is send email #1 to the first customer who strolls by. Tomorrow, you can send email #2 … but you also need to send email #1 to the 5 new potential customers who visit your website. On the third day, you can send email #3 to customer #1, email #2 to customers two through six, and email #1 to four new customers. Certainly by the fourth day, you can see this becomes nearly impossible to manage. That’s why “autoresponders” were invented.
The fact is it really does take an average of seven contacts with your potential customers to make a sale, and autoresponders are the only truly feasible way to manage those contacts. An autoresponder is simply software that lets you write your sequence of email messages … your “campaign” … in advance, and you can specify the time period between each message. Then the autoresponder will automatically send the sequence of emails to your prospective customers.
With an autoresponder, it’s just as easy to manage a million customers as it is 10. This is why the autoresponder is, by far, the most important marketing tool on the web. If you are trying to do business on the Internet, you MUST have an autoresponder.
On the most basic level, there are three types of autoresponders: free services, professional services, and software you host on your own website. Due to legal issues (i.e., the CAN-SPAM Act), Internet Service Provider restrictions, and the logistics of keeping your autoresponder working, it is simply not worth the hassle of trying to host your own autoresponder software for most businesses.
Free services are great for getting started except for three main problems: (1) they limit the number of subscribers you can have and the number of emails you can send, (2) it is hard to switch from one autoresponder service to another, and (3) all the free autoresponder services put ads in your emails (which competes with your business goals). So, the only real, viable option for most online businesses is a “professional” service.
Fortunately, there are a number of high quality professional autoresponder services available for a very reasonable monthly fee (e.g., under $20/month). However, all but one of these services charge you more as your business grows.
There are lots of ways to use your autoresponder and lots of valuable features available, but three most important factors are (1) the number of campaigns you can have, (2) the number of emails allowed per campaign, and (3) the total number of subscribers. The five most popular professional autoresponder services include Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, Trafficwave, and ConstantContact. All of these, except one, raise your monthly fees as you exceed the stated limit for one or more of these three key factors.
Whether you are running an online business or a traditional “offline” business, pre-written email campaigns are a great way to remind customers to keep visiting your “store”. But there are many other great applications for your autoresponder as well.
If you would like to know more about the power of autoresponders, which one offers unlimited campaigns, emails, and subscribers for a low fixed monthly fee … as well as how to make a fortune using the 1 tool every business must have to succeed online, stop by http://MoneyMakerSystems.org and watch my Free Video.
Without a doubt, the autoresponder is by far the most important marketing tool on the web, and I daresay no business on the web can survive without it. And given the work and money saved for the tiny monthly expense, I can’t imagine why any business would try.
Written by Dr. Bryan Stoker, MoneyMakerSystems.org
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