Automatic Responders and Email Newsletters

Ever wondered how some Internet marketers seem to have enough time in their day to find new and exciting things, and expand their online empires, while still keeping everything working perfectly with their other projects? There is one word for this process - “automation”. Automation is the process of using technology to do the monotonous, time-consuming chores for you, without you having to go through the process time and time again.

Take customer inquiries, for example. They take an eternity to send out, but by automating the process with an auto responder, you can set up a structured set of emails directed at your customer query once, and then let it continuously do the work for you.

Using automation for follow up with an autoresponder is where the idea of ‘making money while you sleep’ came from. But remember that just a follow up series will not make you a millionaire overnight. Internet marketing is still all about hard work, but a follow up series will help you to work smarter.

You should have a set of about 6-7 emails in your follow up series, and we will go into detail on the type of content that you should be using in this series.

Benefits
Your first email should outline the benefits of your product or service. Make sure that you keep your first message interesting, short, and to the point, to explain the benefits that the product or service has to offer.

The Need Factor
Message two in your series should be crafted to tell the recipient why the product or service is useful to them, and why they have a need for it, without being pushy, or making the email sound like a sales pitch. This is a good place to provide facts supporting the need for your product or service.

How To Use The Product Or Service
The third message that you will need to set up should explain how to use the product or service, and what other products, if any are needed to use it. This may be a computer with windows XP, and internet access, for example.

Customer Case Studies
Message four should be used for a customer case study. Or if your product needs to be shipped, you could explain the shipping process, or include directions to your brick and mortar business residence if you have one.

Questions And Comments
The fifth message in your automatic responder series should be aimed at answering any questions, and asking the recipient if they have any feedback, or would like more information on a particular part of the product or service. You should offer plenty of ways to contact you, such as email, telephone, cell, and if you have a brick and mortar business, the address of the store. You may also want to include a link for the recipient to follow for FAQ as well.

Customer Testimonials
Use your sixth message to provide a set of customer testimonials, or comments from satisfied customers about the product or service that you provide. Remember that fabricated testimonials are illegal. If you don’t have any testimonials yet, simply leave this part out.

Final Message
Your last message should go over the whole gist of the email series, finishing off with your contact information. Keep this email short, but informative.

Using an autoresponder for your follow-ups no longer needs to take up most of your waking hours. Once you have set it up with the above recipe, all you will need to do is set it, forget it, and get on with other important aspects of your business.

The Importance Of Email Deliverability

Scenario: You have painstakingly written, and designed the best email ever. It is guaranteed to get a response from even the most fickle of your email list subscribers, and you are really pleased with yourself, as you send off your emails.

But if the recipient of your emails never receives their email, they can’t read it, therefore, you have wasted your time, effort, and money. If no one gets your email, it doesn’t matter how well you have written, and designed it, you are never going to get that sale, and statistically, the odds are far from being in your favor!

So lets talk about email deliverability. In the above scenario, we have ascertained that deliverability is vital to your online business efforts. If your customers don’t receive your message, they won’t buy the products or services that you are recommending, and you won’t make an income.

The question is how do you get a great deliverability rate, weave through email authentication issues, and, of course, gain a good reputation as a quality information provider as far as sending emails go? Authentication and reputation go hand in hand to make sure that your emails make it through to their recipients.

Email Authentication
Many of us underestimate the importance of learning about authentication techniques, including certification, accreditation, and reputation. We know these issues do, and will have an impact on our business success, but have little knowledge of how to use these services to our best advantage.

Basically, the origin of an email can be questionable. Just because the email says it is from a particular place, doesn’t necessarily mean that is really from that place. If at any time in your life (guaranteed), you have come across Spam, you are well aware of email claiming to be from one company, organization, or person, and its contents is completely the opposite of what is in the subject line, and address line says.

Spam, phishing, and fraud are rife within the email delivery systems. It has brought about a need for tougher security measures to make sure that those receiving emails are protected, and not harassed by unwelcome, and unsolicited emails that have very little value to them, or worse still, harbor dangerous viruses, or other risks.

Email authentication is a way of identifying the sender, and confirming that the email has actually come from that source. So basically, what authentication does is make sure that the email being sent is actually coming from the person who is claiming to be the sender and not a spammer.

The internet service provider, or email provider of the person you are sending an email to verifies the authenticity of the sender, and among other criterion, comes to a decision on whether the email should be blocked, put in the junk mail folder or delivered to the recipient. As you can imagine, this has a huge impact on your email marketing efforts. You need your emails to be placed in the Inbox of the recipient’s folder.

Deliverability, And Your Reputation

As we just mentioned before, Spam is on the rise, which means Anti-Spam measures are becoming tighter than ever to protect the rights of email inbox owners, and to allow them to choose who they wish to receive emails from. There are two ways that you can increase the chances of your email arriving at its destination, rather than being filed away in a junk mail holder, or scrapped all together.

The first way is through authenticating yourself, which is proving that you are who you claim to be, and you have the email address owner’s permission to send them communications.

The second way is reputation. Reputation is gained over time by proving yourself as a good guy, not someone who spams. By following proper guidelines, Internet service providers will begin to recognize you as a good guy.

Which is the best, authentication, or reputation? They both are the best option, and you should be using both of these practices. By doing so, you can make sure that the emails you are sending out will be received by the recipients in their inboxes, without being flagged each and every time you send them out.

With this type of knowledge under your belt, imagine the scenario above - you have the perfect email campaign, guaranteed to get a response from any subscriber who reads it, and guess what? You really can sit back this time and be pleased with your efforts, because you know that your recipients will receive your emails.