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Articles Index >> Marketing
What Is An Autoresponder?
by Michael Cheney
Lots of people talk about autoresponders and how you can use them to grow your
business online. But what actually is an autoresponder?
Quite simply, it’s a piece of software that enables you to send emails
to people automatically. This doesn’t mean that it writes the emails for
you and it doesn’t involve spam or sending unsolicited email. What it
means is that you set up a sequence of prewritten emails that are sent out to
prospects on your database at regular intervals.
The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Time and time again internet
marketing gurus tell you that the money is in the list. This is not by accident.
The online marketing specialists know that this is fact. The more people you
have on a mailing list that are interested in your products or services, the
more sales you will make.
You can use an autoresponder to essentially send emails out to your prospect
list, even when you’re not at a computer. What you do is you create, lets
say, a seven part email course. Then you can set the intervals for the emails
to, say, once a day and send them one part of the course each day. So you write
the emails one time and then anyone joining that list will automatically be
sent those emails for the next seven days.
This doesn’t matter if you’re online or if you’re away from
the computer. They will get sent automatically. They also get added to the list
automatically. And if they choose to unsubscribe, all of that is taken care
of without you having to lift a finger.
The main benefit to using an autoresponder is connected to the fact that the
majority of people need to be told about a product seven times before they buy
it. So I want to ask you, how many times are you telling your visitors about
your product? Chances are it’s less than seven.
They’ll land on your homepage or somewhere else on your website and they’ll
look at your offering, but the majority of your sites visitors will disappear.
So unless you can get them onto an opt-in mailing list, either a course or free
information that is of multi-part format, the chances are you will have lost
them forever. You can use an autoresponder to send these messages out to people
with their permission convincing them and educating them about your product.
This is simply a form of permission marketing. People will give you their permission
to receive emails in return for you giving them free, quality information. Do
not load the messages with over-hyped sales pitches, but give them real quality
information with a small mention about your product at the end.
What you’ll find is that people come to know you and grow to trust you
over time as you send them more and more information. The longer you can maintain
this relationship with them, the more likely they are to actually buy from you.
The beauty of this is that using an autoresponder saves you the costs of printing,
posting and packaging and enables you to contact and keep in touch with all
your prospects around the clock without actually having to do anything.
The autoresponder that I use, and I highly recommend you check it out, has
a free trial. It’s
called GetResponse and you can visit it here.
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