Looking for an (almost) effortless way to your sales?

Ready for something that will do all the hard follow-up work for you… then use an autoresponder series. Think of autoresponders as your nifty follow-up sales agents… beguiling, persuasive, and highly productive, out there working 24 hours a day, seven days a week on your behalf. To create a blockbuster, sales-boosting autoresponder series, follow the tips below and then… put your feet up and watch those responses roll in!

Here’s to your outstanding success!

Best wishes,

Marie-Louise Cook
Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

How To Create Compelling Sales-Boosting Autoresponders

1. Make your subject lines provocative, original or intriguing. Imagine your prospect or customer with an email inbox crammed full of samey-looking headlines.
Yours must stand out in that list or it will perish (okay, get deleted). Hook your reader in with something that piques their interest or curiosity.

2. Keep your eye on the goal. The ultimate aim of your autoresponder sequence is to build trust with your prospects and continue to build a relationship with your customers and so help you to increase your sales.

3. Prospect vs Customers Email Content. You want your prospect to get to know, like and trust you so that they will feel comfortable doing business with you so give them useful information. To encourage your customers to continue doing business with you (think of all those lovely up-sell, downsell and cross-sell opportunities) after they’ve bought from you, provide them with reassurance that they’ve made a great decision, and then give them step-by-step information about how to use (consume) the product they’ve just bought.

4. Target your market. Know the fears, needs, desires or wants that your customers/prospects have and how your product meets/solves/resolves them. Write down 10 of their biggest problems, fears, needs or wants. They will become the themes of your automated email messages. Use one theme per message. At least one of those top 10 will hit the ‘trigger buttons’ of your prospect.

5. Don’t use a sledgehammer to drive a nail in. Think of offering information rather than a blatant sale pitch. Provide useful information and be subtle with your ‘sales’ message. Think of getting clicks to your landing page rather than trying to sell in the email.

6. Hook them in and don’t let them go. Jay White, autoresponder expert, says your opening statements should be ‘an eyeball pulling opener’. Nice image to keep in mind as you write! If you’re stuck for ideas, use the 5 ‘W’s so beloved of journalists – who, what, why, when and where– let your reader know who you are, why you’re writing to them, what you’re writing about, where you’re from and why they should carry on reading.

7. Focus on your reader not yourself. Your email message must be about your customer not you.

8. That’s my name, don’t wear it out! Use your customer or prospect’s name once or twice at the most in the email. More than that is going to seem unnatural and even creepy.

9. One in three. Send your first welcome and congratulations type message immediately after your prospect has opted-in. It should be a strong message.
Send your next message two or three days later then every three days afterwards. The two or three day gap means you’re still top of their minds but not annoyingly so.

10. No wide loads. To make your emails easy to read, keep the lines to about 55 characters in length. Keep your subject lines under 20 characters.

11. Use an audio link in your emails. Place the audio link at the top of your message so people who prefer to listen rather than read can still access your information. The link will take them to a page where they can play/stream your email.

12. Make it personal. Think of your autoresponder message as a one-to-one communication. Use conversational language. Put your grammar book away and get liberal with contractions (like “you’re” and “don’t” and “we’ll”). Don’t be afraid to start a sentence with “and” or “but.”

13. Think Goldilocks. Your message shouldn’t be too long or too short – like Goldilocks’ porridge, it should be ‘just right’ (that is, about 600-800 words long). Tell a story, press your prospect’s trigger buttons (their overwhelming need/want/desire), highlight the benefits of your product and close.

14. Take Action! Do have a call to action in all of your emails. What do you want your readers to do after reading your message? Do you want them to follow the link to your website? To call your office? Make it clear – tell your readers exactly what steps you want them to take. Let them know in a compelling, benefits-oriented way why it’s in their best interest to take action immediately.

15. And rest… A strong and persuasive sequence of email messages can help you to increase sales and save you time, energy and money. Let those auto responders get to work for you!

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