The Automatic Money Making Machine: Email Autoresponders

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I love writing. Writing copy for letters and emails is one of my favourite things about running a business. You can have a lot of fun with it, express yourself in your own unique way and make sales if you’re good at it.
There’s so much more opportunity these days to write, especially with email where the amount of writing you can produce is limitless.
I can remember back to the days when the only type of marketing you had to do in business was to take out a very expensive advert in the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages would get delivered and the phone would just ring. You might just then send a quotation to the caller in the post along with your company brochure, follow up with a courtesy call and the order was yours.
Doesn’t work like that these days…
You need to work a lot harder, BUT if you get it right you can have orders ringing in the till whilst you’re still asleep dreaming of how to spend all of that profit.
You need an email autoresponder.
What the heck is an autoresponder? Good question, it sounds technical but it really isn’t.
An autoresponder is part of an email system. It’s like you’ve hired a little robot man to sit in a cupboard somewhere and send emails out for you. He’s going to send them to lots of different people and you’re going to tell him exactly when you want them sent.
Ever sent an email at 3am and get an instant response from “someone”?
Well, that’s an autoresponder. It auto responds on your behalf.
Autoresponders are a sequence of email marketing messages that get sent to your email subscribers, your list of customers or general database.
The little robot man never gets tired, will keep doing what you tell him to and never gets bored of your marketing.

Why do I need an autoresponder?

How many times do you need to touch them?
Prospects and leads I mean, and certainly not to actually touch them physically! But how many times do you have to make contact with prospects before they buy from you?
The very latest stats tell us you have to “touch” a prospect on average 10.8 timesbefore they buy from you. Not sure how you achieve the .8 so let’s round it up to 11.

You need to make contact with them 11 times.

Imagine if you had 100 prospects you were trying to convert and they all came into your campaign at different times and you have to make contact with each of them on average 11 times.  You’ll be sending hundreds and hundreds of emails, and you’ll forget and miss some.
Hey, get the little robot man in the cupboard to do it.

What goes into a really good autoresponder?

Lots of stuff.
Firstly and most importantly – a great subject line. Your main job is to get them to open it.
Firstly you should start off with some value for your prospect. Don’t make them all about you. Make the emails all about them.
Try and personalise them as much as you can. Good email management systems can put lots of different fields into the email so you can really personalise them. Just using their first name in the email body will personalise it.
Make them into fans. Send interesting and relevant content.
Then as the sequence goes on, you can start putting in a Call to Action.
Call to Action is when you tell them what you want them to do. You want them to click on a link to buy, put “Click here to buy your widget” or “Call us now on 0121 34…..”

When do I Send Stuff?

You schedule it.
You write your sequence of emails firstly, get them all done and make sure they flow correctly.
Then you schedule when they are going to land. So let’s say someone enters their details into a box on your website and you schedule the emails to land like this:
Day 0 – Welcome Email – Here’s your downloadable book
Day 2 – Have you started the book?
Day 4 – The key takeaways from Chapter one
Day 6 – If you loved the book, you need to see this

What systems shall I use?

There are two main types.
Most businesses use a CRM System. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and these systems can send emails by autoresponder, store customer records, invoice people and basically run your business.
Or you could just use an Email Management System, which just deals with emails and autoresponders.
Some systems to look at are Mail Chimp, Aweber, InTouch, Constant Contact, SalesForce and InfusionSoft.

What now?

Get writing…
…and drawing.
Map out how prospects are going to enter your autoresponder campaign, say for instance they were on a teleseminar or they downloaded a special report.
Then what are they going to receive? I find this the easiest way to visualise what’s going to happen.
Then write the content that is going to go in those emails, print them out and lay them out on a desk in the pattern that they’re going to flow.
This way you can check all of the content and that it flows in a sensible way and maybe swap some around if it makes it flow better.
Get your CRM system sorted and ready for action, load in your prospects emails, create the emails for your autoresponders and press “Go”.
Sit back, have a sip of coffee and watch the cash come in.