Your Ezine-Engine account can help you automate your email publishing efforts with a scheduled series of mailings that are sent to each new subscriber.
Have you been putting off publishing your own newsletter because you're not sure if you have the time to keep up with it?
Would it help if you had an assistant?
An autoresponder is like an assistant who takes over the day to day job of staying in touch with your readers on regular basis.
With your Ezine-Engine account you can set up an autoresponder for each of your mailing lists.
Once you have your autoresponder up and running, you only have to get involved when you have something new you want to share with your readers.
Now that you have an assistant to do most of the work, publishing in email just became a whole lot easier.
Here's how it works.
Automated Message Delivery
As you probably know, an autoresponder is software that automatically emails a series of messages to your readers, according to a schedule that you choose.
(Actual live photo of our
Autoresponder Engine in action!)
As example, if you have a cooking newsletter, you could set up your autoresponder to send your readers a new recipe every week for a year.
To accomplish this, you would load 52 recipes in to your autoresponder all at once. Then set the mailing frequency to every 7 days.
Each of your readers would then automatically receive a new recipe every week, for an entire year, without any further work on your part.
Now it doesn't matter how busy you are. Your readers will get their new recipe each and every week, because your autoresponder assistant is on the job.
Boosting The Bottom Line
Ok, autoresponders sound like nifty whizz bang Internet gadget thingies and all that, and the photo of the Autoresponder Machine is um, well, very impressive.
But will autoresponders really help your online business? The answer is yes.
In fact, if used properly, autoresponders can become the most important part of your entire Internet sales effort, more important than your website even.
Let's look more deeply in to this.
The Challenge
Let's give a little thought to how we shop online.
We might do a Google search for what we're interested in buying. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites come up in the search results.
We click a link, and visit a store. We click around the site from page to page, scanning the offerings. If we like what we find, we may bookmark the site, with good intentions to come back later.
And then we resume shopping. We wander off to some of the other sites we found via our Google search. While we're on these other sites, we find links to even more sites. Where we find links to even more sites.
An hour later the first store we visited may be a dim memory. A day later, a week later, the dim memory of most of the stores we visited becomes no memory at all.
All those merchants have lost their shot at our order, because they couldn't close the deal on the first try.
Even if we are ready to order, we just met these merchants for the first time, and we really don't know yet if they are reliable merchants or not.
We want to think about all this first, and get comfortable, before parting with our hard earned money.
Closing The Deal With Autoresponders
How do we the merchant compete and succeed in an environment like this, where shoppers have instant access to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of our competitors, and some of those competitors are scary disreputable bums??
Let's give the shopper a way to get to know us. Let's give them some time to get comfortable with us. Let's show them we're somebody they can trust.
And, very important, let's make sure we're still in the shopper's life when the moment of decision comes.
If the shopper signs up for our autoresponder while they are on our site, we have permission to visit their email inbox every few days during their shopping process. Now, instead of having to close the deal with a suspicious stranger on the first visit, we have weeks to get to the know the shopper, provide them with more information, and earn their trust.
And, we don't have to hope the shopper will return to us, we can now go to them, with their permission.
A Decision
So...
Do we want one opportunity to close the deal, or dozens of chances?
Do we want to sit around praying the shopper visits us, or do we want permission to visit them, over and over again?
Easy decision, right?
A Change Of Strategy
Seen this way, our autoresponder becomes the leader of our sales team.
We may look at our website in a new way, and begin to see it's number one job as encouraging shoppers to sign up to our newsletter and autoresponder series.
Bottom line, if we're serious about selling online, we can't ignore the email side of our business.
Despite all the problems with the global email system, email is still the best way to stay connected with prospects and clients.
And autoresponders are the best way to automate this process of staying in touch, building relationships, earning trust, and closing the deal.
