Practice relationship basics – remember that relationships depend on communication, and that communication is a two way street. And don’t imagine that a constant bombardment of ads is constructive of a relationship. It only says to that customer that all that matters to you is whether he buys.

You may be saying, “My customers are automatically put on my ezine mailing list so they hear from me regularly. I don’t have time to do more than that.” My answer is, the ezine is a great start. Now use my favorite tool – the autoresponder – to its full, time saving advantage to personalize the relationship. Here’s how:

1. Personalize your communications

Make sure you use the personalization feature in your ezine list manager and your autoresponder to full advantage. You know, [firstname], how you like to see and hear your own name. Whether you realized it or not, it’s your favorite word! But don’t overdo it. Just as you don’t begin every sentence in a verbal conversation with the other person’s name, use the name sparingly in your emails. Make it flow naturally by placing it in sentences that are more personal in nature (note the sentence above where I used your name, for example).

2. Generate feedback

Look for ways to generate feedback from your ezine subscribers. As you noted above, I have started features soliciting your feedback in form of your personal biographical background and information about your website. Anytime you can get your subscribers to share something important to them, they have come another rung on the relationship ladder. It should go without saying that you need to share yourself to encourage feedback. Communicate simply as you would if you were talking to a friend – you will find that your subscribers will come to consider you their friend! Don’t be afraid to take a stand on issues, again, just as you would with a friend. It is difficult for your subscribers to develop a friendship if no personality emerges from your emails. If you are by nature a more private person (as I am), you may need to work at being more open in your communications. Have a friend or spouse read some of your emails to give you honest feedback as to how your personality is communicated. Obviously the latitude you have in expressing yourself is enormous. I receive several ezines whose authors always start out by writing about their children’s braces or their dog’s cancer. While that isn’t my style, if you have a let-it-all-hang-out personality, then go right ahead. It communicates who you are. The personality you project won’t be the favorite of all your readers anyway, but that’s not the point.

Use a spell checker and have someone else proof your emails if grammar and sentence construction give you problems. You have a message to communicate to your subscribers – bad grammar or incomplete sentences obscures that message. Even worse, it says that you didn’t consider the message (and its recipient) important enough to get it right. Don’t expect significant feedback if you don’t respect your subscribers enough to pay attention to details.

Autoresponders also allow you to easily get feedback on site issues such as HTML/plain text, or whether to publish on Tuesday or Saturday. Simply set up separate autoresponder addresses for each reply, or one address with different subject lines.

3. Exceed expectations

Assuming you are already doing the basics such as delivering a good product that does all it claims, and promptly following up on support issues, nothing builds good relationships and customer loyalty better than doing little things that are pleasant surprises.

For example, your customers deserve first rate support and you should by all means deliver it. But why not anticipate as many of their questions and potential problems as possible by including a FAQ/support email in your autoresponder instant message  that immediately follows up your sale? It will not only save you tons of support time and effort, it will deliver the message that you want your customers to have answers at hand before there are questions.

Use another of your follow up messages to offer your customer another product that is a natural follow-up to the one you just sold him. It is not only smart marketing; it says you know what he is likely to need and are not just pitching whatever else you have to sell.

Another message could ask for a testimonial in exchange for some item of value. This tells your customer you value his feedback and are willing to pay for it.

Here’s the biggest relationship-builder. Before you put your product on the market, think in advance what other less costly but closely related products your customer is sure to find useful. Offer these products as bonuses through your autoresponder follow-up series. By doing so, you will immediately set yourself apart from 95% of your competitors. Nothing I know of matches the pleasant surprise of receiving unannounced bonuses that are immediately useful and valuable. It speaks volumes about your thoughtfulness and the value you place on your customer and his needs. Even if you have to pay to get these follow-on bonuses, it will be more than worth it in the long term. One is great; if you can manage it two or three would be even better. Ideally you could continue to provide articles or tips on a continuing basis that relate to that customer and his needs. Autoresponders make it simple!

This is just a sampling of the kinds of relationship-building jobs you can set up your autoresponder to do. Does this kind of approach call for considerable planning before the sale? You bet! While your average customer may not appreciate the fact that you spent the extra time to set up the post-sale autoresponder sequence, he will get the overall message that you care about him as a customer and have gone out of your way to see that his needs are met. As you build a relationship of trust and respect by applying methods such as these, that position you hold in your customer’s subconscious relative to your competitors will move higher and higher. While this is an invisible, intangible thing, it will translate into future sales and a growing customer base. Combined with a continuing flow of good products, this is a recipe for online success. It’s time to crank up the autoresponder and start putting in the ingredients!

ProAutoResponder

FollowingUp

GetResponse

WebResponders

ProfitResponder

Now that you understand some of the principles of autoresponder applications, you are ready to look at some specific marketing techniques. The following article gives some excellent examples of the ways you can use autoresponders as part of a smart long-term marketing strategy.

This is just a broad-brush overview of areas of autoresponder application. Within each area, there is a multitude of special tips and approaches that have been found to be effective.

If you have concerns about the reaction of your opt-in list to your messages, you should understand that they can always stop the message sequence at any time. All autoresponder messages have a clearly indicated removal method, usually a link at the bottom of the message. Clicking on the link, or in some cases sending an unsubscribe email to a given address, will remove the receiver from that opt-in list entirely. This makes it important on your part to avoid bombarding your list with messages, and to make the ones you do send informative and interesting. If you turn your subscribers off and they unsubscribe, you have lost potential customers.

One of the most popular and effective ways is to start an online newsletter or electronic magazine, called an ezine. There are literally hundreds of thousands of ezines in publication, on every conceivable topic. If you have determined the thing or things that make your website unique, you would probably want to use the same theme in creating your ezine. This is a very large topic, but you should realize that most autoresponders (except the free ones) will function to maintain your ezine mailing list and send out your ezine itself.

The selection of a good autoresponder to serve as your ezine mail list handler is explored in much greater depth in my All About Autoresponders product.

The main idea with an ezine is to provide something of value to your readers with every issue. As you build a relationship with your readers, they will become more receptive to any product offers you may have. You may well feel totally incapable of publishing an ezine. There are many resources to help you in starting an ezine; a good one is the How to Write a Newsletter Toolkit.

In addition to having a signup for your ezine on your website, you can use any of the normal advertising methods to attract subscribers to your ezine. Offering a free course on some topic via autoresponder is a good way to attract inquirers who might then sign up for your ezine. You can also do ad swaps with other ezines, where you and some other publisher place ads for the other’s ezine in their own publication.

If you are like many who are relatively new to Internet business, you may be thinking, “Why would I want autoresponders for my little web site?” Or maybe, “Why would I want to unleash a bunch of obnoxious salesbots?”

For 99% of the people doing business on the Internet, operations are based on their own web site. I assume most of you have a web site or plan to put up one. Once that site is in operation, you will be faced with one of the biggest hurdles in Internet business, how to get visitors to your site. No visitors = no sales. Simple formula!

There are LOTS of ways to get visitors to your site – using autoresponders is part of several of them. But for now think in more general terms – what happens when someone visits your site?

Did I get your attention?

What could possibly be more important for a sales web site than whether a visitor buys or not?

As you can see from this discussion, the functions of autoresponders are tightly linked with the fundamental principles of Internet business. Unless and until some method other than e-mail is created for marketing on the Internet, autoresponders in some form will be essential.

The second function is the subscriber list. As you see in the diagram above, when the autoresponder received the message from Joe Smith, in addition to sending the Instant Delivery Message back to Joe, it also put Joe’s name and e-mail address in its subscriber list (sometimes called a contact list).

I’m sure you are starting to see the word ‘salesman’ written all over this description of autoresponder operation. Yes, the primary application of autoresponders is automated sales. In fact, they are sometimes called ‘salesbots.’ We’ll see more about that shortly.
 

 

The word autoresponder comes from the phrase automatic responder. They are also often called email automatic responders. As you might expect, they function by responding automatically. What do they do and what do they respond to? We’ll see in a minute.

First you should realize that autoresponders are just e-mail addresses that act in an unusual way. They can look like any other email address – group@duniainternet.com could be an autoresponder address or the personal email address of someone named Joe. The appearance won’t necessarily tell you whether the address is an autoresponder or not.How does an autoresponder address act that is unusual? Here’s how: When you send an email to an autoresponder address, you will always get a pre-stored message back, usually within minutes – in other words, an autoresponder responds automatically to an email sent to it by sending its pre-stored message back. The following diagram illustrates this basic function.

What message do you need to send to cause the autoresponder to send its pre-stored Instant Delivery Message back? It doesn’t matter at all! The autoresponder ignores the message; all it looks at is your email address, so it can send its message back to you.