Day 17 – Email Auto- Responders
Email Auto-Responders.
As you begin to increase the number of leads you’re getting each day, you’ll notice it get’s harder and harder to stay in touch with them all. If you’re talking to 5 people a day about your business, then after 2 weeks you’ll have 70 different Potential Business Partners who are are interested in what you offer.
If you’re manually sending out emails to each different person to tell them about upcoming training calls, etc., you’ll soon lose track of who’s at what stage. And this could really cost you.
As they say, the fortune is in the follow-up, so it’s important that you make this part of your business a priority.
A great way of putting your follow-up on Autopilot is by using an email auto responder service like aweber or icontact.
I personally use Aweber, and have found that it works well.
The whole purpose of an auto responder account is to take the hassle out of having to write a series of emails to your subscribers every time they join your list. Whenever someone fills out the form on your site requesting their name and email, the auto responder will begin sending them personalised emails in a follow up sequence defined by you.
For example, when writing an email using aweber, you can begin by writing;
Hi {!firstname fix}, how are you?
If your PBP’s name is John, he’ll get an email that reads;
“Hi John, how are you?”
You can also insert your PBP’s name throughout the email message, to really personalize it.
Always write your emails with the focus on educating and informing your PBP’s, rather than using them for blatant self promotion. If your emails don’t add any value to your readers, they’ll soon begin ignoring them, and will likely unsubscribe, or mark them as ’spam.’
If you’d like to get some ideas on what sort of things you can write about, then feel free to opt in to my main site, www.HomeBusinessBuilders.com.au, and you’ll be added to my follow up email campaign. But do me a favour; fill out the form witht the name ’HBB Member’ and for the phone number, write ‘00000.’ Otherwise I might call you thinking you’re a PBP!
When it comes to frequency, you should aim for no more than one email message per day. After the first week, you may even want to reduce it to one email every 2 days.
The good thing about having an auto responder account is that you can send out Broadcast messages. So if you’ve just written a new post on your blog and you want to tell your list about it, you can broadcast a message that links to the blog.
The best emails messages are informative, as well as entertaining. Never be boring. If you want to see a good example of email marketing, subscribe to Matt Fureys website. He markets to the fitness niche, and his business does very well. Love him or hate him, you’ll find that his email messages are hard to ignore.
Setting Up Aweber
When it comes to creating a form in Aweber, you can choose whatever fields you want. For example, you can request that your users leave their name, email and phone number. In general, the less information you ask from them, the more people you’ll have opt-in to your list.
Once you’ve specified your fields, you’ll then be given the HTML code for your website. Simply copy and paste that code and send it to support@homebusinessbuilders.com.au. We can then add it to your site, and your PBP’s will then start receiving your own emails. Also, don’t forget to test that everything is working, by subscribing to your own list. Check that your name is automatically being entered into the follow-up messages, and that they are being delivered on the days you specified.
Important;
Try to write attention-grabbing subject lines for your emails. Most people receive over 20 emails a day, and if they aren’t given a reason to open your message, they probably won’t. It’s the same as in the newspaper industry. A good headline can make all the difference between selling a lot of newspapers, and selling hardly any.
A well- known internet marketer, Frank Kern, said that his best ever open-rate for an email was one with the subject line ‘Bad News.’ Someone reading that title is naturally going to ask, “What’s the bad news? What happened?” And their curiosity will get the better of them. But if you write boring subject lines, like ‘More Information on a Home Business,’ then your messages will be largely ignored.
You can actually use your Aweber account to see how many people are opening your emails, as well as how many people are opening the links that you put inside your email messages (like when you link to your blog). If you can get an 80% open rate, you’re doing well.