A visitor who has been looking around your site for a while has finally found what she wants and is about to buy something. On a sunny afternoon, her cat is sitting on the moss under a visitor's large, fifty-year-old snow-rose bonsai tree when it suddenly jumps down, knocking over the priceless tree.
Your visitor leaves your site in the blink of an eye. If you didn't have the foresight to use an autoresponder to get her email address, you've lost the sale. If you have an autoresponder set up, you can then keep in touch with her and, most likely, make the sale when the poor woman is done repotting her precious bonsai.
Autoresponders are great, flexible programmes that can do a lot more than just answer your emails automatically. Here are a few ideas that will help you use your autoresponder in a creative and useful way to turn a casual visitor into a customer who will buy from you. Use your autoresponder
to:
- Get a newsletter out. Some good autoresponders will handle subscriptions and follow up with prospects who are interested. Your newsletter can keep your customers informed about your services or products while building your reputation as an expert in your field.
business.
- Write reviews. Cover books, software, music, e-books, movies, etc., and put each review into an autoresponder. Review your affiliate programmes by using a link in your autoresponder to go to the page of your affiliate.
- Put together a mailing list. Tell people who have signed up to receive your articles when you've written new ones that they might want to use in their own newsletters or websites.
- Automate your sales process. Use an ad to get your message seen over and over again, which has been shown to increase sales. Put your autoresponder address in your ad so that people who visit will get a lot of marketing materials. This makes it more likely that visitors will become customers. For example, if you're selling a certain product, put testimonials on your autoresponder about how great it is, and add a link to a page where people can buy it.
- Distribute your articles. Writing and distributing targeted articles is a powerful way to build the credibility of your business, bring people to your website, and increase your chances of making sales. Many editors will print what is called a "resource box" for you if your articles have useful information. A resource box has your bio and a short explanation of what you do or sell. It can also have the address of your autoresponder. Say you have written 50 articles. Put them on different autoresponder accounts and make a master list with the titles, autoresponder addresses, and a short summary of each article. Then get your master list out there. Include your publishing rules so that your affiliates can add their own articles to your list. This will increase the number of writers whose work is on your list.
- Send out a newsletter that only your affiliates can read. Tell them about your current sales and any promotional materials that your affiliates can use to bring in more money for themselves. Include tips, advice, and methods that your affiliates can use to promote your business successfully.
Describe your product in detail and make it sound appealing.
- Put advertising out there. Let's say you sell ads on your website or in your e-zine or newsletter. Set up your autoresponder to send all prospects' email addresses the information about rates and how to place an ad. Then follow up with your autoresponder. It can also let people know about any special deals you have going on.
- Distribute an email course. Have your autoresponder send out a new lesson every day. Just make sure each lesson has good information and isn't just a sales pitch. Your content will do most of the selling for you, and it will do it much better. For each lesson, you can include tips on a different topic to show how your product will help the reader. Include the real benefits that the customer will get from buying your product. Make sure that each lesson ends with a paragraph or two that makes your prospect want to buy something.
- After a visitor finishes your course, set up an automatic reminder about your service or product. This will make it more likely for people who have taken your course but haven't bought anything yet to buy something. You can also use these reminders to promote new products or services, as well as the products and services of your affiliate programmes.
have already bought from you.
Now that you've seen that autoresponders can be used in creative ways, try to think of some of your own.
