Communicating successfully with your list, no matter the size, is the key doing business online. Managing subscriptions and unsubscriptions, checking bounce rates, being able to monitor open and click through rates are also as important.
If you sell things on EBay, what about being able to let previous purchasers know about new additions to your product range, sales or provide general information updates? EBay itself does not allow this to happen, but what if you had the ability to ask your EBay purchasers if they would like further updates, and then get them to subscribe to your newsletter?
The question is how to achieve all of this easily and effectively. I have spent a number of months looking and trying different options, many of which ended up costing me money and giving me no benefit at all.
When I started looking, I had heard about autoresponders however, the information on autoresponders, what they truly did and how they could help my business was pretty light. It took me months to decide to try a managed autoresponder – once I did, I was hooked. I’m not sure how I survived without it.
Proper use of a good autoresponder is like your golden goose: the marketing tool that will sell your product far more effectively than any other form of advertising. Few sales are made by impulse buyers, particularly on the internet. Many sales are made after the 3rd exposure, so being able to get your message out repeatedly to people who are already interested in what you have to offer, will result in a larger sales response.
Through my investigations, I tried a “home run” autoresponder and finally decided to use a managed system.
What was I looking for in an autoresponder? When I first started looking, I had the following priorities:
- Management of “Opt-In” and “Opt-Out” subscribers was paramount.
- Reliability was paramount – the system had to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- The ability to send once off messages to individual lists (Broadcast function)
- The ability to use a follow-up sequence to individual lists (Follow-Up function)
As I investigated, this list grew to include:
- Management of separate lists, to cater for the different niches I target became important.
- The ability to split test campaigns within a list
- The ability to send the same message to multiple lists.
My “home run” system was quite good. It allowed me to manage opt-ins and opt-outs, in a very basic manner, gave me broadcast and follow up capabilities but was not particularly reliable. I found that the machine I was running the system on failed as often as not and required manual intervention. By operating my own system, I was also utilising my ISP mail relays and was continually having mail problems as my ISP turned off mail services due to “spamming” issues.
I decided to use a managed Autoresponder service because they took the issues of reliability out of the picture and the service I finally chose also allowed me to monitor the “spam” ratings of my individual emails.
I looked at and test drove several commercial grade autoresponders. I finally settled on AWeber due to a combination of functionality and price.
Since I have implemented AWeber, I have increased my list size by 10 times in about half the time of running my own and am now able to monitor my campaigns by click through rates, open rates and unsubscribe rates for different messages. This funcitonality is incredibly powerful.
AWeber allows a free trial of their service. If you’re not sure about using an Autoresponder, or whether this is the service for you, give it a try. Click here to find out more.
0 comments