Automate
Your Web Business
by: David Coyne
Whether you sell products or services on the Internet,
you should get an autoresponder as soon as possible.
It’s an immense time saver. And for most online
entrepreneurs time is in short supply.
What is an autoresponder?
Without getting too technical, it’s like an
automated email program that responds twenty four
hours a day to any inquiries you receive about your
product.
When a prospect sees your advertising, they send an
email to your autoresponder address, and it replies
immediately with your prewritten message about the
product. Remember, people want info as soon as possible.
If you have hundreds of inquiries a week, you’ll
eat up too much time following up individually.
Best of all, you can load a series of email messages
into the autoresponder and have it automatically send
messages at specific intervals.
Why is following up with several messages better than
only one? Consider this fact from the National Sales
Association: 80 percent of sales are made between
the fifth and twelfth contact. Impulse buyers are
a rare breed.
How do you get started with an autoresponder
The easiest way is to sign up for an account. They
are lots of autoresponder websites and both GetResponse
(http://www.GetResponse.com) and RapidReply (http://www.rapidreply.net)
offer free accounts. However, with free accounts you’re
usually limited to inserting 10 to 20 prewritten messages.
Once your account has been activated, you’ll
be assigned your own autoresponder email address that
you can use in your advertising. Write a series of
email messages to load into your account. Concentrate
on the benefits your product offers.
If you’re not confident about your writing abilities,
you can get sales message templates to model or adapt
for your own use. Try Autoresponder Magic: http://www.autorespondermagic.com/?19597.
Once you’ve loaded messages, you need to decide
on when each message will be sent to your prospects.
Most experts suggest you should contact prospects
at least weekly. Experiment to see what’s best
for you.
Your autoresponder will create a mailing list that
includes everyone who’s inquired about your
product. Most accounts will let you import and export
name to and from your list.
You can also send out an ezine using an autoresponder.
Just cut and paste your content as you would with
a sales message.
Be sure to include a way for prospects and customers
to unsubscribe to your mailings. GetResponse will
automatically remove unsubscribers from your list.
It can also tell you if it was unable to contact recipients
due to invalid email addresses, over quota accounts,
etc.
Once you get the hang of using an autoresponder, you’ll
wonder how you managed your business without one.
About The Author
Dave Coyne is a copywriter, marketing consultant and
president of DC Infobiz. Get an entire collection
of winning autoresponder messages to model, copy and
swipe. Put your website's sales on autopilot. http://www.autorespondermagic.com/?19597
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