Autoresponder Best Practices: Make the Most of Marketing on Auto

Setting up an autoresponder is a fantastic way to teach leads about your services, build trust, and convert them into customers – all on auto.

The problem with autoresponders is that so many businesses get them wrong. They either send an auto welcome email and then stop, or they don’t have a clear idea of what they are trying to achieve.

Here are five crucial factors to focus on when setting up a successful autoresponder series.

Have a Clear Goal for the Series

Don’t launch an autoresponder without a clear goal in mind. There are a number of common goals, some of which could include:

• Make a sale of one or more of your products
• Build a relationship by providing info about your business
• Introduce subscribers to your best content
• Increase social shares
• Educate subscribers in the form of a short course

Once you’ve got a goal in mind, you can focus on this as you put your series together.

Come Up with a Specific Goal for Each Email

As well as the whole series having a goal, each individual email should also have a goal.

Write down a list of emails that you plan to send, and make sure each one has a goal. Focus on one goal per email, and don’t try to accomplish more than one thing with each one.

A goal for an individual email could be to get subscribers to:

• Click on a link to a blog
• Follow you on Twitter
• Reply to the email by answering a question
• Upgrade their free trial to a paid version

Don’t Send Too Frequently

One thing you don’t want to do is bombard their inboxes multiple times a day. Respect your subscribers and focus instead on sending an email once a day at most. In many cases, once every few days or once a week is better.

Avoid annoying them and don’t make it look like you are just trying to get as much money out of them as you can.

Focus on Providing Value

You’ll hear a lot of guidance about autoresponders, such as the length of the subject line, the type of CTA to include and more. But the most important thing is to focus on providing value in every email.

As long as you make it worthwhile for subscribers to open your emails, you have overcome the main challenge. Subscribers are more likely to open future emails if they know that you provide value.

Test Your Open Rates

One of the great things about email marketing is that you can test how effective each email is. The easiest way to do this is to keep a close eye on your open rates.

If your opens start to drop after a certain amount of time, this could suggest that you need to change your emails to keep on providing value. If one email gets opened less than the others, it could indicate a problem with your subject line.

You might want to set up different emails to test them out and find out which ones work best. Whatever you do, don’t just set it up and forget about it.

Set Up a Powerful Autoresponder Series

Autoresponders are a fantastic way to nurture your leads and provide subscribers with value so that they are more likely to turn into customers. Use these tips to set up an effective autoresponder series, and enjoy nurturing more of your leads further down your sales funnel to get more customers and sales.

As digital marketing consultants, we provide clients with a wide range of complimentary digital marketing service and solutions, from conversion rate optimisation (to increase sales and enquiries from client websites) to PPC management and from SEO marketing to social media marketing – talk to us to find out how we help organisations like yours improve site traffic and, most importantly, revenue!