As a child I came across the saying: Fire is a good servant but a poor master.
I think that saying rings true even more of computers.
Most people seem to be slave to their computers, rather than getting the computers to do the work.
An auto-responder is a great way to put computers to work. As any good person in marketing knows, you have to keep in contact with your ‘prospects’. People rarely buy from you the first time they talk to you. I know marketing gurus who have fantastic systems of sending out emails one after the other, ‘warming’ up the prospect ready for the ‘sales chat’. They reckon that six is the magic number of contacts.
Imagine the computer could do that for you. It is a process, so perfect for automation.
The person signs up to a list. They get a sequence of emails, starting from that day, that address their particular need. If they respond to an email, it comes to you, so you can deal with them personally.
With a bit of creativity you can use this as a service to them. Imagine they want a reminder to do something every day for a week. You can set up a series of emails that go out on the seven days following their sign-up. You check ‘the system’, in this case aWeber to see how far they are through the sequence.
Supposing that on day 3 they make a purchase. The sequence is no longer valid for them. You can make it so that when they sign up for your product they are automatically taken off the old list.
You have an event comes up. You want to send an email to all your lists. You want do avoid duplicates where people are on more than one list. No problem… or you want to send to all people on a particular list UNLESS they have already made a purchase. Easy!
You want emails to go down on particular days before an event, reminding people to book. Simple!
You want to integrate this data into your Salesforce leads. There is a free app for that!
Suddenly you have a lot more time for following up those personal contacts. The rest is on ‘auto’.
For more information about any of this, just contact me!
