Who doesn’t want an automatic money machine?!
Yesterday I shared one of my most powerful strategies for making more sales and closing bigger deals.
In short, following up with someone until they said stop, or until they bought.
And when I was doing that as a salesperson, all of that follow-up was manual. Meaning, I sent each email individually.
As marketers, we can’t do that.
When you have an email list of hundreds, that’s big enough. But what about when you get into the thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
It’s of course impossible to handle those emails manually and on your own.
Especially when you’re talking about follow-up emails. For example, if everybody is supposed to get a certain email 10 days after they first contact you, and you have 100 new leads per day… It’s just not happening!
Luckily, there’s a tool for this. It’s called an “autoresponder.”
Now, there’s some language confusion here. Because if you’ve ever dug into your regular email and tried to set up an automatic “out of office” reply for when you go on vacation, you may have seen that called an autoresponder. Because, well, it is. It automatically responds to email for you.
But that’s not the kind of autoresponder we’re talking about today.
We’re talking about a marketing tool sometimes called a “sequential autoresponder.” From the day someone gives you their email address (usually through an opt-in form on your website), it keeps track of how long they’ve been on your list.
And as the marketer, you’re able to say, “I want this email to go out as soon as they sign up, and this one to go out a day later, and this one to go out three days after that, and this one three days after that…” And so on… You could conceivably set up an autoresponder sequence that literally lasts an entire lifetime, if you had enough emails to send.
It’s simply a technology mechanism that allows you to automate the follow-up process.
And with this, you can sell to 10,000 people as easily as you can sell to 10 — with each individual getting the same experience starting on the day they sign up.
Not only that, if you have a system that works today and it’s for an evergreen product, the experience of someone who signs up today will be identical to that of someone who signs up in 3 years.
It’s about as close to an “automatic money machine” as you’re ever going to get.
These autoresponder sequences have become one of the most important tools in an internet marketer’s arsenal because they leverage that powerful principle of selling… Follow up until they buy, or until they tell you they don’t want to hear from you anymore.
(The tools that do this for you automatically put an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email.)
Do it right, and you’ll be walking each customer through the sales process from beginning to end…
Nurturing the relationship until you’ve made the sale…
And adding value to their life all along the way, just by them reading your emails…
You can and should tell stories, give tips, offer to answer questions, reveal insight, highlight aspects of your product and offer, and in general focus on giving in these emails.
(There are huge courses on how to do autoresponders — although the core of it all comes down to answering the question, “If I were in the prospect’s shoes, how would I want to be treated and what would bring me closer to the sale?”)
And then you can largely “set it and forget it” as you focus on sending leads into the front-end of the funnel, where they can sign up for your email list.
The best way to learn how to do autoresponders right…
If you want to get really good at this, I have a simple suggestion. It’s something I did back in 2006 or 2007, that’s made a huge difference in my marketing career.
And this applies whether you want to get an internet marketing business going…
Or if you’re a copywriter or consultant who wants to help other businesses with their marketing…
You should get an account with one of the major email autoresponder providers (I recommend Aweber for most folks).
You should find a product to sell. It can be your own, or it can be an affiliate deal.
You should set up a website to use to drive traffic to — a simple blog works.
And you should put together a series of autoresponder emails that send people to the sales page for that product.
The process of getting this all set up, writing the emails, then sending traffic to sign up for your autoresponder emails will lead you to ask a lot of questions about the marketing process. It will present many challenges, too.
As you find answers to your questions and overcome your challenges, you’ll be getting a real-world education in internet marketing that works — one far more valuable than buying another course or program.
There’s nothing that replaces real, hands-on experience.
And the best, fastest way to get that is to just sign up and get started.
What are you waiting for?
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets
