Are You Afraid of Autoresponders?

By John Hartley

OK, I admit it! I ignored the best advice I ever got about internet marketing and affiliate marketing for well over a year!

What was it? That I should have an autoresponder, and send follow-up messages to people who signed up at my site. Why did I do that? Well, it all seemed too complicated, too many follow-up letters to write, to difficult to set up the form on the web page.... and I did not want to spend $20 a month in case it did not work.

Serious problem I had, didn't I? Do you have that problem? Well, if you do here's the deal with autoresponders. You type in a series of messages at the autoresponder service, and put in how often they should go out. Something like, one day after they sign up, and then at two or three day intervals for maybe seven or eight messages.

Not all these messages sell something. Some just give information, and all should just get the prospect to go to the link in the email. When the prospect gets a series of seven messages, he or she is at least ten times more likely to sign up for your product. Why? Marketing studies show that people need to be exposed to an idea or person or firm five to seven times before they purchase.

So you can see that sending someone straight to the merchant's site is doomed to failure most times - unless the prospect is desperate, and has a deadline of some sort, either real or imaginary. This is why we need autoresponders.

What's so good about autoresponders?

To start with, when you send out a message from your own server using a mailer system, you can expect one in three of those not to reach the person you sent it to. It was not like three or four years ago, but following the Can Spam laws in the US and elsewhere, the ISPs and even Outlook Express consider all sorts of messages to be spam. Overkill, and that overkill is hitting your affiliate business.

50 per cent more messages get through

The top autoresponder systems get well over 90 per cent of their messages delivered, partly because they measure your message and tell you whether it will get through or not. Straight off, this means that if you use an autoresponder system, you are likely to get 50 per cent more messages delivered than if you do it yourself. Yes, 95 per cent delivery is 50 per cent more than 65 per cent.

That is if you have some sort of page where people can sign up at your site. Don't have a form there? Well, you are wasting so much money, it isn't true. Not sure how to put a form on your site? The autoresponder service will do it for you - well they give you a template in which you put your data.

Most important of all, once you start sending people direct to your autoresponder series, they become your client, and you will be able to sell other products to them later.

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