Squeeze Profits from Your Autoresponder Although web businesses use autoresponders extensively, it's doubtful that many are taking full advantage of this tool to broaden profit potential. Are you missing out on more repeat visitors, better customer contact, enhanced marketing and greater revenue? Maybe it's time to broaden your autoresponder use. Lead capture is likely the most common autoresponder use. A common technique is to drive traffic to a lead capture page with a pay-per-click campaign and offer some juicy information in exchange for a name and email address. Sales messages can eventually be sent as follow ups to the information series. But autoresponders can be incorporated in many other ways. The impact on your bottom line can be substantial, especially if you combine several autoresponder uses. Autoresponder use beyond lead capture can be slotted into two categories, although there is some profit-boosting crossover: - Marketing: information directly designed to promote or enhance sales. - Services: making information available to customers or visitors, helping to increase business visibility, draw return traffic and ensure customer satisfaction. Here are four effective ways to use autoresponders in marketing: 1. Tossing a customer survey into the autoresponder message mix can provide you with valuable information about your business techniques, especially if you offer a gift of some kind for completion. The survey can be timed to go out after a certain period, after completion of an information series or after a fixed number of sales. 2. Relationships can be strengthened by sending out a customer appreciation gift or an unadvertised bonus. To retain someone who might be neutral about your product or service, send out the offer early on. Of course, loyal customers deserve a nice surprise as well now and then because they are hard to replace. 3. Training and motivating affiliates. 4. Offer a free gift when someone unsubscribes. By exchanging products with another marketer, each of you may gain a customer or subscriber when the other loses one. And the parting gift can create goodwill that might rebound in various ways. In the services category, depending on the nature of your website, you could create a long list of options for visitors to choose from, including a list of free reports. You can use these reports to cross over into the marketing category by offering subscriptions within them to information that is more sales oriented. Your services list could also include: 1. Responses to frequently asked questions. 2. Details on your services and products. 3. Ezine archives. 4. Testimonials, if you have a long list. Of course, encourage everyone to pass on the information to a friend. 5. Public domain reference material, branded for your web site. 6. Any other material that is lengthy. Remember, many web users are still on dial-up services, some with a limited number of hours per month. Anything you can offer to reduce their time spent reading online will likely be appreciated. And excellent service translates into another marketing vehicle, one that the autoresponder can enhance nicely. Todd Kenovas is Marketing Manager for Webways Media, the web advertising solution. See http://www.webwaysmedia.com for more information.
|
