As a small business owner you need to take advantage of every opportunity you can get to increase your profits, and utilizing an autoresponder can do exactly that! They are a great marketing tool that can help you build and maintain a list of prospects, stay in touch with current customers, send out new offers, products, services, promotions to proven buyers, and all-around just keep your business growing at a steady pace and running a little more smoothly.
In the internet marketing world we use autoresponders for listing building, email marketing, follow-ups, sales funnels, making money from affiliate promotions, and a lot of other things. They are one of the most important tools for any internet marketer. And for the typical small business owner, they can certainly be used as a great way to help grow your business even more without a whole lot of extra time or effort on your part. You can’t beat that!
Email marketing can give you an amazing return on investment (ROI) because it’s super cheap, quite simple, not very time consuming, and the response rate is relatively high in most cases. Those are all great things for a small business owner without a huge marketing budget or a lot of extra time to spare.
Here are a few ways that small businesses can use autoresponders:
* Continue Building Relationships with Existing Customers
One of the most important things you can do as a business owner is to build up a database of customers/clients and build a strong relationship with the people who have done business with you. It’s a lot easier to get a repeat buyer than it is to get a new one.
Utilizing an autoresponder is a great way to do this. It will allow you to easily keep your customers educated about how to best use your products or services, send updates, give valuable information that helps them or that they might be interested in, send offers and new opportunities, keep them informed on company changes, and so much more.
* Educate New Leads
It usually takes several communications to turn a lead into a prospective customer and then several more before they become an actual buyer. So it is very important to keep in touch with them in order to keep your business in the front of their minds and educate them about why they need your products or services, and the benefits of them.
You can imagine how time consuming, confusing, and downright tedious this would be to do manually! But with an autoresponder you can write a sequence of emails that are set to send at predefined intervals based on when the lead subscribes. Then, the emails will go out automatically and in order, so you don’t have to mess with them again. Just set it and forget it!
* Automate Your Frequent Emails
As business owners, we all have those “regular” emails we get all the time that basically require the same standard response. These can be very time consuming, especially when you add up all the hours you spend year after year replying to these emails with the same information.
Autoresponders can solve this issue by creating a sequence of emails that you would normally send manually and set them to automatically go out to all new clients. This makes you far more efficient and allows you to focus on other important parts of your business.
* Broadcast Messages
When you have time sensitive information or an offer that needs to be sent out now, or you just want to say hi to all of your customers or prospects, you can easily broadcast a message to your entire list. Everyone in your database will get the same email at the same time (or you can segment them if needed) thus making it so much easier to contact everyone at once. This is some awesome marketing power!
Anyway, the clear point here is that if you aren’t incorporating an autoresponder into your business, you are leaving money on the table, and making life a lot harder on yourself! This is a must-have for all businesses, small or large.
Here’s a list of 5 of the most popular autoresponder services for you to use (in no particular order, except #1):
1) Aweber (highly recommended) – This is what we use and love!
2) Constant Contact
3) MailChimp
4) List Wire
5) GetResponse
If you have any questions about which autoresponder to use, how to set it up, the best email marketing techniques, or anything else at all, you can contact us. We will be happy to help!