Auto-responder
Chapter 1: Setting up your Website
Section 6: Setting up your auto-responder
This is an important topic that we probably need to discuss now in a little bit of detail. We will also discuss this in more detail later in Chapter 3 when considering how best to use technology to leverage our time and effort to get the most out of our business.
Auto-responders are really just a series of pre-written e-mails that people get at times pre-determined by you. Don’t let the simplicity of this fool you though: this is EXTREMELY powerful stuff.
Think about what businesses used to have to do (and some still find it useful in certain industries to do to this day) in order to stay in touch with customers or potential customers. Create physical newsletters, mailers, and catalogs; maintain a mailing list; pay to mail out to the list. Then, next month or next season, do it all over again. Sounds expensive to me!
You aren’t just sent a newsletter or catalog once: that would be wasteful on the part of the company. They recognize that the timing may just not have been right for you when you happened to recieve their mailer. But next month may be.
The important thing is to keep in touch relatively often and consistently, so that when you think of their industry or product category THEY are who you think of as providing that product or service. Without maintaining such a pipeline alot of money would be left on the table since most people don’t buy the first time they are exposed to a product or service, it takes 5 to 9 times or more on average of hearing a message before a purchase is made.
That concept is equally important to us as network marketers. The "purchase" we have to offer is more than just a simple product or service, it is an opportunity that is going to cost some level of time, energy, and money commitement depending on their particular goals. Because of that, timing is EVERYTHING.
Now, think about what an auto-responder is again keeping all of that in mind. We write our messages once and they are sent out to potential "customers" continuously, on a schedule, for free, and indefinitely! This is all automated, without the need for us to do anything more than: 1.) write the messages, 2.) put a way for them to opt in to our list on our website, and 3.) get targeted people to our website!
I will help you with each of those 3 components at various places. Below, I will help you with finding a service to use, and getting the opt in box onto your website. (See the video tutorial on this page for how to do that.)
As a bonus, on the next page I will let you import my e-mail messages right into your account to use, so that you have a great starting point and can modify the messages to your liking from there.
Finally, in regards to getting targeted traffic to your site in order to have people that will opt in to hear what you have to say, I will teach you many different paid and free ways to do that in Section 2 of this site.
The exciting thing is that as you build up a list of 500 to a couple thousand subscribers, as long as you provide good information and keep in contact with them, the timing will be right almost EVERY DAY for someone to join you in your MLM or network marketing company!
Ok, so let’s get started….
First off, there are three main autoresponder services that I would recommend:
1. 1shoppingcart – This is the service I recommend that you use and the one I use myself. It is a little more expensive than the others, but the basic package (which includes everything you’ll need to get started) is just $29 per month. The nice thing about 1shoppingcart is that you can upgrade to also accept payments via a shopping cart (when/if you have your own product to sell), so you won’t need to add a different service at that point. The other big bonus here is that you can set your e-mail campaigns to be sharable so that others can import your messages. This is how you can use my e-mail series, I’ll tell you more about that on the next page.
2. GetResponse – This is a very popular service, and is only $18 per month.
3. Aweber – This is another popular service, only $20 per month.
Once you set up your account, it should be fairly straight forward to start an e-mail campaign. These services make it very easy for you to add the code for an opt in box to your website. You will just be cutting and pasting their code into your html editor program.
Then, you simply need to write and save the e-mails in the campaign when you are logged in to your account online.
Click on the video link on this page to watch me set up a campaign, create an opt in box, get the opt in box to my webpage, and write the first e-mail of my campaign. Note that I will be doing all of that in 1shoppingcart, but the other two services should look similar if you chose one of them.
As a final word on that, always make sure you test your opt in box to make sure it is working properly. If there is a problem, you will know immediately. Give me a call if there is.
On the next page, I’ll show you how to get content for your auto-responder series to start with for free …
