Mailing Lists And Auto Responders - What Exactly Is The Big Deal?

A mailing list in full use with decent auto-responders is a joy to see and literally poetry in motion.

How would you like to sell a product to a customer and then market more of your products to that same customer in the future automatically literally without having to do anything (apart from some one time setup) ?

Interested? Well you should be because mailing lists are big business, and lots of businesses fail to see just how important capturing a customer?s email address is.

Even if you do not have your own product i.e. if you are an affiliate marketer for other peoples products I am going to try to convince you of the importance of a mailing list you can use to market over and over to customers.

Logically, it makes sense to sell to existing customers doesn?t it? You have bought this existing customer to your website in the past and they may have purchased a product from you, or perhaps they were only a potential customer who visited your website, and then left without purchasing.

In either case, there is an untapped market, and mailing lists and auto-responders are a great way to convert potential buyers into customers and existing customers in repeat-business customers.

It all starts with the mailing list. It?s very important to capture the visitors name and email address when they get to your website, so that you have an opportunity to build a relationship with them in the future.

So how do you go about that? After all many people are reluctant to give out an email address to just anyone, because we all dislike spam, and you have to have built up a level of rapport before people are comfortable giving you their email address.

It?s really a catch-22 isn?t it? Well two things will help here, firstly the quality of the information on your website will be a real plus. Relevant quality content will show the visitor that this is not a dodgy website, but rather a real website run by a real person.

Having a privacy policy and real contact information including phone numbers is also very important and helps in showing your customer that you are a real living person.

With all that said, many potential customers would still be reluctant to give you their email address, so you have to give out an incentive, a reason for them to give you their email address.

This is where a useful report, a useful e-Book, or other information can come in handy. Tell the visitor if they sign up to your mailing list, they get access to the report, or whatever it is that you are offering free of charge. If you haven?t got anything else to give away, think laterally.

What about offering a coupon to be used to claim a discount when ordering, or some other benefit.

People get the opportunity to find out more about you and your products and services with auto-responders. Often it may take five or more pieces of ?content? before someone feels comfortable enough to purchase something from you.

I have purchased a lot (and when I say a lot the emphasis is on the words a lot) of e-Books in my time, and the quality of a fair portion of them was sub-average at best.

In many cases I would not have purchased the e-Book if I had read some of it first, but on the other hand there are some purchases I have not made because I wasn?t sure what to expect quality wise, and being able to read a few chapters might just have swayed me to purchase the book).

Offering potential customers the chance to read some of my e-Book without paying in advance has worked very well for me (the chapters in the auto-responders are almost exactly the same as the ones in the e-Book!).

And of course the regular email is actually anticipated by most subscribers and gives me the chance to talk about other products, and services I am able to provide as well as giving the subscriber the chance to buy the e-Book at any time.

I see it as a win-win and it is my own little unique approach to giving extra value to my subscribers. Technically people can subscribe and grab the entire e-Book if they are patient, but I am ok with that as I am hoping they find the information is very valuable and useful to them and they get a lot of benefit out of it.

Who knows down the track I may have another product for sale that they may take advantage of because of the relationship I built up with them with the auto-responders.

A lesson to be learnt here is to not be afraid to give things away to your subscribers. In fact doing so will do wonders for you, not the least is the feeling that you are helping people out and hopefully empowering them.

Who knows perhaps the subscriber did not have the funds to be able to purchase the e-Book at the time, but is now empowered to go out there and apply all the principles and enrich their lives. It makes me happy to think I may be able to help people in these situations (of course I have to eat as well, but I think you get the idea).

The thing to remember with free giveaways is to make sure it?s a quality product and relevant to your site. If your freebie turns out to be useless to your subscriber and not of value, they are going to unsubscribe faster than you can say ?oops I blew it?.

Speaking of un-subscribing, it?s also very important for the visitor to know they can un-subscribe anytime without penalty, so make sure you make this clear on the sign up/opt-in page, and then ensure you actually do unsubscribe them if you receive a request to do so.

Although not specifically related to web traffic, I also recommend you have clear instructions in your mail-outs on how to unsubscribe and how to update to a new e-mail address, etc. You will save a lot of support time doing this. This information does not need to be in every email you send out, but certainly in the early ones and then every now and again during your auto-responder series.

In terms of managing your mailing list (giving the visitor options to subscribe/unsubscribe, storing their address and name details, etc). It?s preferable that you use software to do this, rather then doing this yourself manually. There are a number of reasons for this including: -

1. Email follow-up (auto-responders). Its imperative (in my opinion) that your auto-responder emails sent out to your potential or actual customer is personalized using their actual name.

No one likes thinking they are receiving an impersonal generic letter that is cold and unsympathetic. Compare this to receiving an email with your name in the subject and body of the email, it really sets your emails out as quality and the reader will think you have written this email just for him/her instead of it coming from an auto-responder and emailed automatically by a computer.

2. Double opt-ins. What this essentially means is when someone decides to subscribe to your mailing list; they get a confirmation email sent to them. They then need to open up their mail inbox and click the link sent to them to confirm they have received your email and at this point (and only at this point) are they added to the mailing list.

This ensures the email address given by the visitor is correct (they actually received an email from you) and because of that fact alone will make it more likely that they will not assume down the track that your emails are just spam. Speaking of spam this double-opt in goes a long way towards ensuring you are fully compliant with the anti-spam laws.

Software can handle this task easily and automatically. Don?t fall into the trap of not using opt-in?s. In other words don?t try and eliminate the ?confirmation? email in the process because you just never know if the email address is valid or not, meaning you will lose business! E.g. A person could just use test email address.

3. Automatic subscribe and unsubscribe ? Decent mailing list software will manage the whole process of subscribing/un-subscribing automatically meaning people can unsubscribe or subscribe without ANY intervention or having to wait for you to go though your email.

This is particularly important to me living in Australia when I am often asleep during US daytime hours. The last thing you would want to do is have customers or visitors think you are ignoring them.

4. Auto-responders ? How about the ability to schedule a series of emails for your subscribers when they do subscribe? Maybe a ?welcome? email when they first subscribe, then another ?Do you need to know anything more about our e-Book and benefits it will give you? email after 2-3 days, a special offer on day 5, a related affiliate product offer on page 10, etc. Decent mailing lists will allow you to do this and to establish any number of campaigns and to have multiple mailing lists available for each customer/potential customer.

Auto-responders really are the bee?s knee?s (Aussie slang for great), no they really are. Let?s go to an example of how this could work.

Every few days (or whatever period you define), after they subscribe the subscriber receives an email from me that is AUTOMATICALLY sent out.

Your message is sent out, and the contents of the email are personalized for each person. The entire process of subscribing and un-subscribing is handled automatically using double opt-in?s. All totally automated, and all you have to do was a one time setup of the messages you want sent, and select the frequency (in days), and the rest is done automatically.

Can you imagine how much time you will save, but also how much information you are providing to your customers automatically? This is a huge time saver, and the benefits flow to both yourself and the visitor.

Automating things is one of the first steps to achieving truly great things, and an auto-responder is a great thing to use to automate your customer or potential customer follow-up.

I future email will discuss auto-responders in more details, so look for that email coming your way very soon!

Now there are a heap of companies providing this type of software functionality. If you do any research you will find that AWeber is generally acknowledged to be one of the best, and I use them exclusively.