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Autoresponders Generate Leads; How to Convert Subscribers Into Buyers

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What are Autoresponders?

An Autoresponder allows you to send new subscribers a pre-written series of email messages. To see an example, enter your email address into the black and orange box with the heading Small Business Success in the right sidebar of this site. (A sidebar is the narrow column next to the wider content area.)

When you do, every few days the marketing system I use will automatically send you another email message.

Autoresponders Generate Leads; How to Convert Subscribers Into Buyers

 

How to Set Up Your Own Autoresponders

Using an email marketing system such as GetResponse, create a mobile responsive template for your autoresponder messages.  Visit that page to watch a video that shows you how your messages will look on mobile devices. That feature is very useful for ensuring the effectiveness of what you send.

Spend some time building your template for maximum effectiveness. Add your logo and use the colors associated with your brand, typically the colors of your website and social media headers.

Be sure to include social sharing buttons so your recipients can send your messages on to friends, family or co-workers.

Also include social sharing icons that link to your social media accounts. These will increase your followers and encourage sharing across social networks.

By creating a template, you ensure that every message has a consistent look and feel. Then write or copy and paste your messages into the template and save them.

Autoresponder Frequency

Select the spacing for your messages. These are typical:

  • Welcome / thank you for subscribing message sent immediately upon subscribing
  • First autoresponder message same day
  • Subsequent messages sent every three days*

*Some aggressive marketers believe in sending messages every day. Personally I feel that is too many, and anytime people get busy and end up with more they one they are more likely to unsubscribe.

Landing Page or Subscription Form

Now that you have your autoresponder messages ready to go, you need a lead capture form (like the one in my right sidebar) or a custom landing page.

Now what?

Once your pre-written messages have been sent, what do you do? I suspect most write ten or fifteen or some other number of messages and when they’ve been sent – they do nothing. Then they wonder why they bothered to send those messages at all because their phone doesn’t ring and no one contacts them – even though many of the messages included call-to-actions suggesting just that.

The appeal of having a website, mailing list, and social media for many is the hope that they will eliminate the need to pro-actively prospect. Unfortunately, they don’t really.

Think about the companies that offer the most compelling incentives for subscribing. All of them eventually try to get your phone number or send you messages outside the autoresponder sequence.

If you want more customers, the bottom line is that you must reach out to them, ideally by phone.  Use your autoresponder as the top of your sales funnel rather than a standalone tool.

What is a Sales Funnel?

SlideShare Highlights:

  • Visitors fill out your optin-in form for your autoresponder series
  • If they buy, they become customers
  • Opt-ins have turned themselves into leads
  • Video on slide 21 – click play to better understand how sales funnels work

Autoresponder solutions have ways to automate moving subscribers between lists. Suppose you’re sending an autoresponder series selling something in particular. Once someone buys, you don’t want them to continue to receive that series, but you do want them to continue to hear from you.

This video explains how this process works:

What Should You Do With Your Leads?

At the very least, you must continue to send additional messages to your subscribers. You can set up a rule as described in the above video to move people to another list. Or you could add a message to the end of the series offering:

  • Another autoresponder series about something else
  • Subscription to your blog posts
  • A subscription to an aggregated feed of all the content you write across multiple sites. (You can see an example of how that is done in my All Posts by Gail Gardner feed. All WordPress sites create author RSS feeds by default.)

Continuing to send your subscribers messages at least once a week keeps your list “warm”. But it isn’t the best way to turn them into customers or clients. That requires reaching out to them, ideally by phone or in Skype, Facebook or Google Plus chat.

Manually Following Up

The people who are the most successful are pro-active about connecting with their target audience. Nothing works as well as actually talking to your leads in person.

While it would be wonderful to think that your autoresponders alone will generate all the leads you need, there is a good reason they’re called “leads”.  Andy Nathan shared his lead follow-up process. Although he wrote about generating leads from LinkedIn, the process of follow-up is similar.

The key takeaway is that you cannot expect all of  your subscribers to reach out to you. Sending them messages should convert them from “cold” leads to “warm” leads and make them more receptive to hearing from you. But it is still up to you to reach out to them.

Do you have any tips on following up your autoresponder series?
We’d love to hear them in the comments below.

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap
Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist she mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

Comments

  2. Hi there.. Thank you so much for the great share. Very informative post. i would like to appreciate the author who wrote this. 🙂

    Reply

  4. What a great post! I often see people get totally confused about this. I talked to a client yesterday who said… well , I don’t know about this free gift I am offering on my website. People are downloading it but then nothing else comes from it. So I asked her what she was sending as a follow up and she which totally surprised her. She needed to send emails? Wasn’t that spamming?So some things that might be really obvious to a marketer, or not always that obvious to a someone who out there being good at what it is they are good at… You know what I mean? Following up through email can be scary…So, good job for writing it out in this post! Linda

    Reply

    • Hi Linda,

      Thanks for taking time to comment. Often clients have someone else set up their mailing list and lead capture form. They don’t really understand how it all works. Even if they do, they get busy and forget what is even in the mailings.

      So many people want their website or social media shares to automatically generate sales. What they don’t realize is spending time interacting with people one-on-one actually increases sales much better.

      If I knew years ago what I know now I would have spent more time following up and contacting people directly and less time being well known on social networks. It does open doors, but the time it took is more than most businesses have to invest.
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Mailing Lists: What to Do With YoursMy Profile

      Reply

  5. This is another best way for generating leads. Although GetResponse is an awesome place to create responsive emails without any hassle. Thank you for making post for flexible to understand.

    Reply

  6. Connecting with clients has to be personal; that\’s why startups should invest time and effort in communicating with their target market. However, as the business grows, micro-managing becomes impossible. By creating an autoresponse system with relatable content, you get to hit two birds with one stone. You also need a very good writer.

    Reply

  7. Article and enlightening step by step how to relate effectively with the list . I did not know about the automatic rules in GetResponse . Thank U

    Reply

  10. “Thanks for sharing good information, awesome post..keep it up…!

    Twistfuture is a leading Android Application Development company offering professional android app development services.

    Thank you!”

    Reply

  11. Hi,I regular top blog readers, and your blog is in my one of top blog reading list, I really love and like reading your blogs! And I really liked this post as well.. All the best keep writing.Regards,Dr. Debasish Mukherjee

    Reply

  12. Thanks for sharing this information. I will subscribe to your blogs for future updates. please post more blog post so that many people get advice or information.

    Reply

    • Welcome, Soumya,

      Thanks for sharing this post. Even though many thought email marketing was going to die, it still generates leads and sales for many businesses. I rarely take time to read email messages, but when I’m ready to buy from my favorite small brands I do search my email address I use specifically for that purpose to see if there is anything on sale or for special offers. So it works for brands whose products I already buy.

      I also have a list on Facebook that I put all these same brands into so I can support their efforts. Few realize you can check a box when you follow a brand that says “Get Notifications”. If you don’t click that or make a list like I did you won’t see them unless you regularly interact with what they share by commenting, liking or sharing it. I do both for these small brands and I encourage others to find small businesses and support them.

      These are my favorites: ShopOrganic.com, GrassFedBeef.org, TropicalTraditions.com (for Gold Label coconut oil and fresh produce from Wisconsin), SwansonVitamins.com (for organic Traditional Medicinal teas).
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..Autoresponders Generate Leads; How to Convert Subscribers Into BuyersMy Profile

      Reply

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