Tweet

Using Auto responders to drive your online business

Guest post by: Robert Strong

Article Overview: For many of us that have been in the online business arena, we know that auto responders are definitely a way to drive your online business and save tons of time. But what is an auto responder exactly, I have never heard of it before I started my own business. I may have thought it was some sci-fi action hero or even a medical term; boy would I have been wrong.

Using Auto responders to drive your online business

For many of us that have been in the online business arena, we know that auto responders are definitely a way to drive your online business and save tons of time. But what is an auto responder exactly, I have never heard of it before I started my own business. I may have thought it was some sci-fi action hero or even a medical term; boy would I have been wrong.

So what is an auto responder?

An auto responder is a computer program that automatically answers an email or request sent to it. A good example is when you sound out an email and sometimes get a response back that reads something like "your email could not be delivered because......" this is an auto responder. In today's world auto responders have been used more heavily for marketing, which saves the business owners tons of time and money.

How do I get an auto responder?

While I currently use AWeber for all my auto responding needs and wants, there are many different options out there available. With AWeber I not only get the option of setting up auto responders but also to send out blog posts and updates. You can go online and search auto responders in the search box and be given multiple options. While I can only speak specifically about Aweber because I have used them from my first day of my business and have had zero problems. Setting up an AWeber account is quite simple and there are numerous tutorial videos on how to accomplish this task on their site and online.

Why would I want an auto responder?

Oh boy, do I have a lot to teach you; but that's ok I understand as I was also asking these questions before. So you are wondering if using auto responders to drive your online business actually works; the survey says "yes"*, notice the asterisk though. This auto responder set up is not the golden key, the silver bullet, or magic potion that will make you millions. You will need to add some attention to your lists and send out more great information and valuable content.

How can I use an auto responder in my business?

It doesn't matter if you are selling pencils on the corner sidewalk or have your own law firm. If you have a website or blog, you can maximize your customers with an opt in box and an auto responder. Below is a good example:

Let's say that you owned a Lawn and Garden Business that did everything from selling tools to fertilizer and you had your own website that you regularly posted information on. This could be information ranging from the differences between a hydrostatic and manual transmission on a riding lawn mower to the differences between different fertilizers and when to put them down. On your site you could offer a free how to video on "how to put down fertilizer properly and which spreaders do the best job", this would be in the form of an opt in box. Once people have opted in for this "free video" you now have their information and you now can start marketing to them in the way of education. You can send them information on a weekly basis in the form of videos or articles on subjects like new mowers that just came out, how to change your lawn mower blades, how to reduce grubs in your yard. People will start seeing you as a leader and an expert in the Lawn and Garden Business and they will migrate towards you when they need products for their lawn.

As you can see in the example above it is quite easy to use auto responders to drive your online business. You say you don't have an online business, if you have a brick and mortar business but have a website; you have an online business. If you have no website, you better get one and look me up to help you with ideas and tips and tricks to make it awesome!

Related Articles
  Email marketing solutions
  Bad Credit Auto Loans - Proper Solution for Your Online Car Financing
  What You Need to Start an eZine Publication
  What You Need to Start an eZine Publication
  Can’t Afford Customer Relationship Management Program Try Auto Responder to Increase Sales
  Business Startup Costs: It Is Cheap To Get Started Online
  Using Technology For Network Marketing
  Why Is The First Auto Insurance Quote Not Always The Best Quote?
  How to Get a Used Auto Car Loans Using 4 Effective Tips
  Easy Steps To Prepare Your Marketing Plan For Your Business
  Have You Thought About Why Having Your Personal Brand Might Be Important?
  Publishing Your eZine – the Pros
  What Can Online Marketing Do For You?
  Tips on Writing Auto-responders with PUNCH!
  Online Email Marketing Services & Solutions
  From Rags to Riches with Online Self Employed Business Opportunities
  Five Ways to Market Using Email
  Apply for Refinance Auto Loans and Save your car from being Lost!
  Online Conversions...Yes, You Can Improve Them
  Are You The CEO?

Article Tags: auto responders, business arena, own business
Referred by: http://www.MeetKarenNewman.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Email autoresponder messages: what delivery intervals? - Advanced segmenting of email lists add greater flexibility. For example, separating buyers from customers. It makes sense to let buyers consume the product they just purchased. Stop the regular intervals here a little bit before sending normal promo emails. It can be done with Auto responders, but manual process. With advanced shopping carts, this is more automated, but initially the set up can be complex. To get around this, what I do is add separate and new squeeze pages to create "sub-lists". So one lead comes through funnel A, then after the lead went through a few emails in the pre-loaded interval, I will send a new squeeze page. While the first funnel continues to send relevant emails, the new funnel starts sending information only relevant to the squeeze page. This way, the subscribers don't get confused.
RE: Offline Marketing V/S Online Marketing - You can't just rely on either one of them to get most effective, but if a business uses all of them to better position, it will be really nice. While calling Newspaper ads offline in your example, if a unique domain is used to drive and monitor traffic back to a website, then that becomes online at the same time. If you break them down to different topics independently, I think you'll generate interesting discussions.
Re: Offline Marketing V/S Online Marketing - both are inportant. Use offline to drive traffic to your online buisness and use online marketing to promote your offline buisness
How Many Ad Campaigns Have You Tried Before One Worked? - I actually got this idea from a comment made by Litekepr a few weeks ago. People are always looking for ad campaigns that will drive business their way, and get discouraged when they don't get instant results. Would anyone care to share how much advertising they did, and where, before a campaign 'clicked' and the business took off? I publish an SF webzine, with ads there from Google Adsense as well as Amazon. A few months ago, in order to drive traffic there, I also tried Google Adwords, which was a big mistake. An expensive week before I figured out how big a mistake it was. --- Unless you're selling big ticket items, Adwords is not the way to go. Now, simply by having a lot of pages on the net, lots of links, etc. my traffic is growing and my adsense income is growing. It's taken a year to get respectable...
Re: how many hours do you spend in here per day? - Like the other responders, my time on the forum varies from day to day. It depends if there is anything new that I can respond to in a constructive way. If so, then about 30-40 minutes I guess. It's been more like 0-10 minutes in the last few days though - but that is mostly due to my suffering from "Japanese summer lethargy" ("natsubate")!!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

9 tips to increase ROI in PPC Campaigns

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.