4 Ways to Let Your Autoresponder Make Money for You on Auto Pilot

Once you have set up a system to get people to give you their email address — whether it’s on a squeeze page or on your blog page or however you do it — you are going to start to collect a LOT of email addresses. You will get so many, in fact, that it is going to be nearly impossible for you to manage them manually.

You don’t want to have to spend hours every day replying to email yourself, so what you need is an automated program to do it for you. At that point, what you need is an autoresponder.

Autoresponder Defined

An autoresponder is a program that automatically handles much of the administrative duties of maintaining your email marketing campaign.

Autoresponders will send out your email blasts to the people on your list, capture email addresses from prospects responding to your squeeze pages, distribute your free giveaways, and collect valuable data you can use to measure the success of your marketing plan.

Autoresponders can be programmed to send out a series of emails to the people on your list or to send emails only to pre-determined subsets of people, all based on a frequency and schedule that you control. You also can set up your autoresponder so that it flags addresses after a certain number of failed delivery attempts. This is helpful in cleaning up your list and keeping it up to date.

Automating Your Autoresponder

Most autoresponders also include the option to automatically insert your customer’s name in the body of the email. This makes it seem like you are personally sending the email to our individual subscribers.

Depending on the sophistication of your autoresponder, you can obtain a lot of data about the effectiveness of your email marketing program. Every program will tell you how many emails were successful sent, but more sophisticated autoresponders also can give you analytics on such things as:

• How many of your customers actually opened your email
• How many acted on your CTA and clicked through to your landing page
• How many deleted your email without reading it
• How many were sent to dead addresses
• How long it took between the time the email arrived and the time it was opened or deleted
• Other relevant information that is going to be helpful to you in fine-tuning your email marketing campaign.

Patterns will quickly emerge that tell you what types of emails your customers liked, and which ones turn them off.

Making the Most of Your Autoresponder

Generally, what your autoresponder does is most of the administrative work for your business. It’s like having an administrative assistant, only one that doesn’t need a salary or days off.

• Use your autoresponder to send out emails according to a specific schedule that you determine in advance.

• Handle the distribution of an email series according to pre-defined parameters

• Respond to emails from customers

• Send out digital products

• Automatically follow up with customers to check for satisfaction and ensure continued good faith business with them

• And much, much more

For the online marketer, autoresponders aren’t a luxury. They are a necessity. There is simply too much to do for you to handle it all. Rather than paying somebody else, such as a freelancer, to handle it for you, hand it off to your autoresponder.

Making your autoresponder work for you will help give you more time to focus on more important aspects of your online marketing business. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

Should You Pay for Leads to Expand Your Customer List?

The common thinking among many Internet marketers is that you are never supposed to buy email lists because the people on that list don’t know you. After all, you don’t know for sure they are open to what you are selling. They may mark you as spam and get you banned from email services.

All those things are true, in general, but there are certain lists that absolutely are worthwhile to buy. So you shouldn’t dismiss buying leads altogether because there is a right way and wrong way to go about it. You just have to be very careful about how you proceed because there are risks.

Most Lists Contain High-Target Customers

You should only buy leads if there is a high probability that they are going to convert. What you don’t want is a list of people that you essentially are going to be cold-calling — via email — because that’s going to be low-converting.

Obviously, the best leads — and the optimal way to reach people — focus primarily on customers who have interacted with you at some point or another, either through your squeeze page or your sales page or your YouTube videos or on social media or what have you.

Those people have already opted-in, so they have in effect given you an implicit permission to contact them. As a result, they are going to be far more likely to open your email and, more importantly, to act on your call to action.

This is a very important point because if people haven’t opted-in to receive your emails, it can be very dangerous for you.

How Much Should You Pay?

Now, you see a lot of companies out there that will sell you thousands of email addresses for $99 and the like. You may be wondering if these are a good option.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution. If you have done business with the company in the past or the company has been recommended to you by somebody that you trust, then it may be a good idea to consider buying a list from them and trying them out.

Beware of making large scale purchases from companies that you aren’t familiar with because there are a lot of scammers out there on the Web who would be happy to take your money and sell you a list that is filled with either dead addresses or emails they have scraped from other places that aren’t going to do you a lot of good.

Risk vs Reward

Buying lists can be a big expense, so what you have to consider is the value that you are getting for your money. It can be a financial burden and there also are other risks involved.

For example, you can seriously harm your reputation if you buy the wrong list because when you buy a list and contact people who never heard of you before, they can send it to their spam folder.

Whenever they do this, it sends a notification to the email service. If it happens often enough, it can lower your sender score, which can affect your domain’s ability to send emails through that email service in the future — even if they are legitimate emails to people who have asked you to contact them.

Also, if you are marked as spam often enough, every time you send out an email from your website, it may be automatically diverted to the recipient’s spam folder, so they are never going to see it. And that’s a total waste of time and money.

Don’t Get Banned

If enough people mark your unsolicited emails as spam, you will eventually get banned on some of the biggest email providers, such as Yahoo and Gmail.

If that happens, you are going to have to shut down your website and start over with a new one.

That’s not going to put you out of business, but it will delay your efforts to get your business up and running. Plus there will be the additional expense of buying new domains, setting up new pages, re-establishing your autoresponder, not to mention the opportunity costs associated with being offline.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.