FOLLOW-UPS WITH AUTORESPONDERS

Anyone who gets involved in marketing products on the
internet will know that follow-up is VERY VERY important.
Most sales occur after the 3rd, 4th, or 5th follow up, and
doing this manually can become very time consuming.

If your site suddenly gets a high ranking in the search
engines or you put out an advert, you will have to be
prepared to deal with the traffic and to reply to your
enquiries.

Now you will need to follow up 3 or 4 or even more times in
most cases before a prospect becomes a customer. It makes
sense to use different emails in each follow up, and each
time describe some extra advantages of your product that
you have left out in previous emails. This can become very
confusing if you have new enquiries each day. You will have
to send each of your follow-up emails to a different group.
You will have to keep track of which follow-ups were sent
to which groups.

There is software available that allows you to personalize
your messages by merging your emails with your recipients
names. You have to add the names and addresses to your
groups, but after this, it can send out your message to
everyone in a particular group, and filter out certain
addresses if you want. This can be useful if you want to
avoid sending a message to those who may have already
received it in a previous mailing.

However even with such software there is still quite a lot
of work to be done. Email addresses have to be collected
and added to your mailing groups, and you have to keep logs
of who has received a particular message. You also have to
make your own record of which messages have been sent and
to who so as not to send the same message to the same group
twice. If your follow-ups have to be done at specified
intervals after your initial enquiry, you have to make sure
you remember to run your mail program on those days.

The answer is to use autoresponders to do your follow-ups,
and leave a minimum of work for you to do once a prospect
has become a serious lead or even a customer. An
autoresponder allows you to set up your follow-ups to go
out at various intervals after the initial enquiry. You can
set different messages up on the autoresponder and specify
when each message should be sent after receiving the
enquiry. To see how they work send a blank email to
mailto:wsc@quicktell.net and you will receive a series of emails
with my 5-day website success course.

It is often a good idea to set up two or more
autoresponders to handle the initial enquiry. The first
autoresponder will be in reply to your ad, and will give
some details about your product or service. It will also
ask the recipient to reply to a second autoresponder if
s/he wants more information. The second autoresponder can
include some advantages that you only hinted at in the
first reply, and then follow up with the remaining
messages. This has aroused your prospects' interest and is
part of the sales process.

In one of your follow up messages you will need to make a
call for action. If you don't ask your prospects to buy,
the chances are they won't. One of the best ways to do this
is to let them know that for a limited time they will
receive a certain discount or that the offer will only be
available at a certain price for a limited period.

Some people argue that autoresponders don't allow you to
deal with each prospect individually. However it is easy
enough to set your autoresponder to personalise the replies
to address your prospects with their first name for
example. You set up your autoresponder so that if a
prospect replies to the message, the email will come to
your own email address and you will be able to reply
personally.

If your business revolves around sending and receiving a
lot of email, autoresponders are an essential tool.

1) They drastically reduce the amount of work.
2) They reduce the possibility of making mistakes sending
out the wrong reply or to the wrong address.
3) They do not rely on a person being at work at a certain
time to send out email.
4) They allow you to make follow-ups efficiently.
5) They give you more time to concentrate on promotion and
marketing.

If you are hosting your website on a full-service web host,
the chances are they will provide you with an
autoresponder. However you don't need a website to have an
autoresponder. You can use an autoresponder service. If
your business needs more than one autoresponder or
autoresponders that send out more than one reply at
intervals, we have listed some good services here:
http://www.thewebseye.com/autoresponders.htm .

Autoresponders have already become an essential marketing
tool, and their use is likely to increase as more and more
businesses realise the necessity to automate.