The older I get, the more communications technology excites me! It can be such a powerful force to get your messages out. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lone small business owner or a huge multi-national, you can compete on the internet these days on an equal footing, if you know how to use what’s on offer.

My latest source of excitement is the wonders of autoresponders! Their power to automate your words and make your messages viral is phenomenal if you get it right…

It is incredible that despite computers having been around for twenty years and the internet for about a decade, small to medium sized businesses have still not grasped the sales power of a well-targeted email marketing campaign. With other technological advances and the onslaught of social media, business owners are struggling to put all of the pieces together and juggle the various components of their marketing mix.

The autoresponder is one of the least talked about ‘work-horse’ tools of successful marketers. One great bonus lies in its ability to do your marketing exactly to your schedule once you have set it up. Autoresponder systems allow you to do the crucial on-going relationship building and marketing to the list of prospects you build. Once your messages get through spam filters, if you can achieve that magical click through, your chances of staying ahead of your competitors is increased.

Email marketing software tools allow you to set up well-thought out campaign messages that you want your markets to receive about you and your products or your industry. They allow you to keep your products and your brand and persona in the sights of your buyers and even reach new ones. With great copywriting in your headlines and used in combination with other strategies, you can ‘set it and forget it’, allowing the software to deliver your communications when you need to get the message out, for instance at special promotion times.

It’s worth knowing that a person has to be exposed to a product on average seven times, before they will buy. Autoresponder email software facilitates the process of more successful online marketing. Selling your ‘benefits’ consistently will increase your chances of a customer sharing their contact details with you to find out more when they are ready to buy.

In spite of the fact that we are all bombarded daily in our in-boxes, master marketers have combined the arts of strong copywriting and customer psychology to get past the sceptic reader and generate interest in them and their product over the ‘long term sales cycle’.

Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Survey 2009 found that ‘relevance’ of content of emails was the utmost priority of direct marketers using this medium. The second biggest challenge was gaining attention over competitors. Knowing one’s business, relationship development and information marketing all come together in strong copywriting in email campaigns.

There are 2 main functions to email marketing campaigns:

1 Collecting data about your prospects from your opt in box on your website, allowing you to customise your campaigns to warm markets. When used in conjunction with tracking your marketing campaign management will be more successful.

2 Automation of emails; if you were to have to send emails to all of your marketing leads individually, it would be extremely time-consuming and the campaign co-ordination and lead management would be nigh on impossible.

Here’s power to your clicks! : )

I would definitely recommend setting up your own Autoresponder email marketing software account. I’d say, in fact, it’s mandatory for any direct marketing success…

In times of increased competition and a plethora of marketing media, it is important to have a number of online marketing strategies in your arsenal to stay ahead of the game.

Return On Investment can be difficult to calculate in terms of marketing campaigns, unless set up right. It is important to monitor the time and costs incurred of any single campaign vis a vis sales generated as part of your planning and marketing strategy.

Some software will allow you to track click through rates to your web-site, so you can measure your success. Coupled with after-sales research and feedback, you know whether you are hitting your targets.

Email software may also facilitate maximising your ‘opt in’ rate or ‘digital foot-fall’ via tools to generate appropriate opt in boxes, where clients share their contact details in return for some benefit offered from doing so.

Aweber is one such email marketing software and stands out in terms of its success for deliverability of over 99% compared to competitors. It’s reliability and customer service are second to none in the industry and well worth checking out if you are looking to leverage the power of the internet for increasing sales.

If you are looking to learn more about how to make your email campaigns more successful and increase your bottom line, I have written more about these software systems on my site. Share some of your experiences of other software systems – gaffs, glitches, goals and glory! Which system do you prefer and why?

So Why Invest in Automated Email Software?

    “Autoresponders are the greatest marketing invention ever created for the Internet, hands down!” – Forrester Research

Let’s Take A Closer Look at the Advantages of an Autoresponder System:

  • Having your own email marketing software enables you to protect that most valuable of your assets as an entrepreneur, time management. Their administration can be out-sourced, as can the copywriting. Your need only be role the strategic planning and monitoring. Once set, you can forget and your software acts as your digital salesperson.
  • Email marketing software enables you to capitalise on that equally important asset in direct marketing, your business leads. Being able to personalise your messages with the tools offered means that you are maintaining a relationship with your customers.
  • This leads nicely into list building. Some email marketing software offer opt-in box tools, for you to maximise traffic from your web-site.
  • Timed campaigns can be switched on and off according to events going on in the wider world: Christmas, Thanks-giving, New Year, Summer holidays, etc.
  • If you are building up to a specific event, autoresponders enable you to give customers plenty of notice.
  • Email software will allow you to broadcast messages without having to under-take previous key word research in order to get noticed – albeit your copy-writing and research of product and customer needs attention.
  • Automated email campaigns allow you to do extra affiliate marketing. This can work well as an adjunct to your main messages in your ‘ps’.
  • Video is increasingly taking precedence for relationship building, but some people just don’t feel comfortable with this medium. Emails allow your personality and brand to come forward in a no-pressure way.
  • Never under-estimate the potential viral capacity, as your prospect forwards your message to other warm prospects, expanding your reach to ‘warm markets’. Digital media acts as a tool for ‘word of mouth’ recommmendation. Make your messages entertaining. We all love a laugh!
  • As a team builder for instance in an MLM, replication of effort is vital to leverage income. Any email campaign you set up, can be duplicated by your downline, if you choose the right software that offers appropriate tools to do so.
  • The option to set up separate lists of prospects to direct different campaigns to allows you to target your marketing messages according to whether your leads are ‘cold’, warm or hot, or what you believe their individual preferences may be. Emails which are automated make co-ordination of various campaigns more viable given shortages of time or staffing pressures.
  • Depending upon your wider marketing strategy, there may be scope for linkage via the software to your own team of phone consultants who can do your telling and selling over the phone to your leads as a more ‘human face’ of your campaigns. This is all about the marketing mix and bringing the customer closer to you.
  • Branding can be optimised through on-going contact. The intent of your email is simply to share the link to your online marketing pages with your email contact list. Rather than hard-selling, you’re simply sharing information by linking for instance to a company blog, where you can share your expertise or sharing the latest information or research on issues related to your products and services, with links to your sales pages. Recently, larger companies with bigger budgets are creating entertaining videos with no direct references to their products, only ‘sponsored by…’ The equivalent in small businesses might be videos of participation of staff in charitable events with humorous or ‘heart-warming’ story lines.
  • Email marketing software is a powerful tool when integrated with other social media. E.g. They provide a complement to Twitter, MySpace, Facebook relationship marketing. Social media is a great forum for expressing ‘brand personality’. These can be links in generic emails, or form a ‘ps’ just to keep eyeballs on you for longer!!!

    • I’ll be returning to the theme of marketing mix strategies again, but would love to hear any additional comments you have to make about what your priorities are. Have you read the MarketingSherpa report? If so, what did you find helpful to your business development strategies? Feel free to post any questions here about Aweber, as this is my preferred choice and am just kicking off with it properly as we speak.

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