Summary
1. Introduction
2 – What is an autoresponder?
3 – When to use an autoresponder
4 – Four specific points in using an autoresponder
5 – How many email messages should be sent
6 – The time interval between one message and another
7 – The right balance between content and commercial proposals
8 – Minimize unsubscribes and spam complaints
9 – Characteristics of autoresponders
I0 – The elements in favor of an autoresponder
11 – The elements against an autoresponder
12 – How to do effective work with an autoresponder
1. Introduction
One of the most notable developments on the email marketing front is the use of autoresponders, i.e. software that automates the response via email to a pre-established event.
Among the most well-known events are, for example, the registration to a list, with the insertion of one's own data, such as name and e-mail address, by a visitor into a registration form placed on a landing page, or on an initial web page, such as a homepage.
After registration, a sequence of email messages is activated which is called follow-up.
The ultimate goal of a follow-up is to convert a subscriber into a customer
In this article, I will explain what an autoresponder is, the pros and cons and the most effective strategies for using it.
Autoresponders offer a unique service that can provide you with many benefits as they can produce results with limited effort on your part, after the initial setup, which requires some effort.
However, autoresponders can also present some problems.
In the continuation of the article I will examine the methods of use, with which its functioning can be optimized in order to obtain the best economic results, even in the case of its use within a marketing mix strategy.
2 – What is an autoresponder?
An autoresponder software is a program with which you can activate an automated sequence of email or follow-up messages, when a user, as already mentioned, subscribes to your list or provides his email address to your company, perhaps with a business card.
Typically, the process works like this.
First step: a user registers by filling out a registration form on your website, or sends an empty message to your e-mail address, with the subject sign up.
You automatically receive a welcome or thank you email for signing up if you have set up the subscription with single opt-in.
If, however, you have chosen to operate with double opt-in, after the user's registration request, the user will receive a request to confirm registration.
After confirmation, the user will receive a thank you message for confirming their registration.
This first message could have different contents:
to. be just a welcome message containing a brief introduction to the course, which will then begin with the first lesson contained in a second message;
b. contain an offer or just information relating to a product that your member intends to purchase or has already purchased.
Second step: the second message could in turn have information, offers and promotions, or the first lesson of the aforementioned course, structured to send the lessons on specific days, and therefore, the sending of the first lesson cannot start from the moment of registration, which will only see the sending of a welcome message.
Third step: in this phase, a number of messages can be automatically sent to subscribers which can range from 7 emails for a course of 7 consecutive days, to 4 weeks to send a course of 12 lessons divided into 3 lessons per week .
Or an intermediate course, of around 200 pages, consisting of 72 lessons to be sent in 25 weeks, or six months.
You could then move on to the 130/140 lessons of the advanced course to be sent in 52 weeks or a year, always 3 lessons per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, usually between 9.00 and 9.15 in the morning.
The basic course to be sent over the 4 weeks represents a kind of introduction and preview of what the contents of the intermediate and advanced courses will be.
Therefore, those who sign up to participate in the longer courses do so after having examined the contents of the shorter basic course and will therefore certainly be very interested.
According to some, you should send an average of ten to twenty emails, most often with several days between each email.
The greater the number of emails in sequence, the greater the interval between messages to be sent should be.
For example, within the first three or four emails, there may only be a day or two between each email send.
However, towards the end of the follow-up, it is common to leave a week gap between emails so as not to frustrate the subscriber and encourage them to mark you as a spammer or unsubscribe from the list.
3 – When to use an autoresponder
The first thing to do, of course, is to consider whether you want to include an autoresponder in your marketing mix plan.
Currently the panorama is very varied, but in general a distinction is made between autoresponder providers that can be installed on one's own server and programs resident on the servers of email marketing service providers.
In both the first and second cases, however, they are software resident on servers.
Going into technical detail, there is no difference between the two types of software.
In fact, the owner of the code of an autoresponder software, or the owner of a license of the same software, who normally reside on a remote server, could very well both become suppliers of external email marketing services, ceasing to be the first software supplier for customers, and the second seller of its own or third party products, using the same software.
The only significant difference between the two software would be the huge investment in dedicated servers, but structured as housing, and not as hosting, for the management of a large number of databases, in addition to the fact that in the first case you would purchase a license that you could manage in complete autonomy, while in the second you purchase not its license, but the e-mail marketing service.
As far as myself is concerned, I have always chosen autoresponder software from the first group, i.e. the CDs. self hosted, because after many years of experience it only takes me a week to purchase a server, install the autoresponder software and compile the messages to send.
In fact, I just have to copy and paste the lessons already present in all my courses.
However, given that every year there are more and more complications in the area of autonomous management of the installation of self-hosted software on a server and the management of the server itself, and that all of this represents a vulnerability for one's own management activities. marketing, I'm lately heading towards the software installed on the server of the company that manages autoresponder services for its customers, such as Aweber, GetResponse, MailChimp, etc.
4 – Four specific points in using an autoresponder
When you think it's time to use an autoresponder, you'll need to consider the following points:
• how many email messages should be sent;
• the time interval between one message and another;
• the right balance between content and commercial proposals;
• how to minimize unsubscribes and spam complaints.
Naturally, also with regard to email messages with a follow-up, reference must be made to the application of common email marketing rules, such as text-only or html messages, templates and graphics of html messages, the structure of the messages, the scores relating to the evaluation of the words that can trigger spam blocks and finally the creation of the object.
Certainly some of those points are in common with sending newsletters, such as the number of emails to send per unit of time, the intervals between one email and another, and how to minimize unsubscriptions and spam complaints .
I can state that, in general, the four points mentioned are specific for the follow-ups created with autoresponders, precisely because online follow-up marketing is a tool that is used above all to gradually make oneself known in order to earn the trust and credibility to then propose offers and promotions and then proceed with direct sales.
I now examine each of these points.
5 – How many email messages should be sent
In the case of autoresponder software installed on a remote server, it depends first of all on the hosting company where you purchased your site and therefore on the monthly bandwidth you have available, which will not allow you to send more than a certain number of messages, over a period of time, normally determined in hours.
For those who have such an autoresponder, if a spam problem were to arise involving a given IP number due to the high number of email messages, which could give rise to suspicions of spam, of the receiving servers, the problem of blocking the IP number becomes relevant depending on the type of server that has been purchased.
If it is a virtually dedicated server or a dedicated server the problem is related only to your IP number.
However, if it is a shared server, where an IP number is necessarily shared, all accounts created with that number will have the same problem relating to IP blocking.
However, in the latter case the risks are reduced to a minimum because either the possibility of installing autoresponder software is excluded, or the hosting service will impose numerous limits on its use and therefore also on the number of email messages that can be sent with that software.
In the case of E-mail Marketing services, such as Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp, etc., if you have purchased the ability to send unlimited messages, then you will pay monthly in proportion to the growth of your list, but you will also pay a monthly cost , whether you send or not.
And the costs are justified by the resources dedicated to you.
However, when you create an entry level account on these services, i.e. the cheapest, not only do you not have the ability to send follow-up sequences, but when you do, many of them will not allow you to send any more ' a specific number of email messages per week or month.
Obviously the reason for their choice, in the absence of the necessary resources, which you will not have purchased, is due to the need to reduce spam complaints and preserve the integrity of the IP numbers dedicated by this service.
In fact, in the case of an IP number, to which multiple accounts of multiple customers are normally connected, which was implicated in spam problems, all the accounts dependent on that IP number would be involved in a spam block, even temporary, but lethal for the effectiveness of each of their online marketing follow-ups.
Many email marketing service providers will also allow you to mark the days of the week that you don't want your messages to be sent, so you may also want to avoid sending emails sent on weekends.
However, you would be doing so against your own interests, because perhaps recipients have more time to read your content on the weekend and also because email sending rates are lower on weekends.
I examined all this from the point of view of technical problems.
If instead we look at the specific marketing aspects, according to the opinions that were once prevalent, the maximum number of messages in a follow-up should have been between 12 and 15 emails.
And in fact it was argued that 10 messages were not enough to convert a subscriber into a customer.
On the other hand, it was also believed that with more than 15 messages there would be a risk of a high number of cancellations and spam complaints.
In support it was indicated that subscribers who did not convert into customers might feel frustrated or no longer interested in your promotions.
This problem reminds me a bit of that of messages that are too long, which can certainly be solved with the inclusion of useful, interesting and engaging content.
So all this doesn't have much relevance for the simple reason that the number of emails you should send should depend above all on the validity of your contents and therefore on the level of involvement that you manage to obtain from your recipients and therefore on the time needed to transmit such involvement.
6 – The time interval between one email message and another
Never let too much time pass between one message and another because you always risk them forgetting about you and considering you a spammer, with all the consequences that can arise from this.
Since recipients have just signed up, they will consequently be excited to receive your follow-up messages.
So try to take advantage of this enthusiasm by perhaps sending a message every two days.
You can then send a message every three days.
As time passes and we reach the end of the follow-up sequence, the messages will also be received by subscribers who have not converted into customers and who may unsubscribe or consider you a spammer, so it would be better to extend the interval up to 5 days or even a week between messages.
On the other hand, you shouldn't even send one message a day.
But more factors come into play here.
That is, not only does the time interval or even the number of messages depend on your content and engagement, but it also depends on how established your brand is.
In any case, if the contents of the emails consist of lessons from a course, the follow-up could certainly be very long.
In this case you will not be able to send the course emails once a day because you will have to leave enough time to read the lesson.
7 – The right balance between content and commercial proposals
What should be the best balance between content, promotions and purchase offers?
One of the biggest risks that can compromise the effectiveness of an autoresponder is that of inserting advertising, which is perceived as inconsistent or which makes your message appear like a mere advertising flyer.
This way your subscribers will get frustrated with these inappropriate sales attempts and will subsequently mark your email as spam, unsubscribe, or simply not open your future emails.
Therefore for a follow-up email, which contains advertising banners in its messages, the greatest risk could be represented by a lack of coherence with the initial editorial line, if this had been based on the exclusion of advertising.
But even if it wasn't, exaggerating with advertising banners is not an advisable practice.
If you really want to advertise, do it in a very soft way in the final part of your messages, perhaps as a purchasing advice, inserted in the resource box of the message.
In cases where the recipient is upset by these practices done in an exaggerated or inconsistent way, you could find yourself with many cancellations or even be considered a spammer, with all the consequences of the case.
All of the above activities can reduce the quality score attributed to you by hosting and email service providers and make it more difficult for recipients to receive your messages.
Here too, a concept already expressed on other occasions returns with reference to the importance of contents.
When you present truly useful content there should never be problems with deletions or spam, even if you include a purchase offer in each of your follow-up messages.
While it is acceptable to include a sales offer along with useful information in each email, it is not advisable to create a sales-only email, for example every fifth email in the series, because this practice is not helpful in order to protect the reputation of the sender of the messages.
In any case, the concept of never presenting exclusively sales messages within the sequence remains valid.
However, if you always want to sell, do it in a very soft way, giving your purchasing advice by inserting your advertising in a part of the message that is consistent with the subject of the purchase offer itself.
By following this line you will be able to advertise the product in question in any part of the message.
But always remember to never insert banners or purchasing advice that are unrelated to your content.
8 – Minimize unsubscribes and spam complaints
The strategies for minimizing unsubscribes and spam complaints, as well as the number of people who don't open your messages, are the same ones you can use not only with an email follow-up, but also with sending a newsletter or a broadcast.
The most effective system to obtain such a reduction is, as we have already mentioned previously, to write useful and engaging contents that make follow-ups with many messages acceptable, with minimum intervals between them, and also containing the your offers and commercial promotions.
After all, it is precisely with this content that you will be able to gradually gain the trust and credibility of your subscribers, until you start to get the first sales.
Other strategies that involve this reduction are connected with the positioning of the link to be able to unsubscribe from the list, and therefore with the ease with which a subscriber can find this link, and with the ease with which a subscriber can unsubscribe, i.e. with just one mouse click.
Therefore the member gets an advance guarantee, in the sense that if he wanted to cancel he could do so immediately and without problems.
In this way you also offer a guarantee on the correctness of both the opt-in and opt-out procedures that you have adopted, and you will gain greater trust and consideration from your subscribers.
The practice of asking the recipient to place their follow-up message in their best email inbox is also a way to reduce these risks.
9 – Characteristics of autoresponders
Autoresponders have the same basic characteristics as other tools that belong to the e-mail marketing sector, such as newsletters and broadcasting, but in addition they need to be customized with tags, for the needs associated with segmentation of your target.
And this is when autoresponder software allows you to personalize both follow-up, newsletter and broadcast tags.
In fact, this need for customization with tags is rarely felt when newsletters and broadcasts need to be used.
Furthermore, autoresponders can be used for segmentation and even micro-segmentation operations, thanks to automatic response actions of the target, when it has assumed a certain behavior, depending on a certain event.
But they can also be applied to produce the same results as a market survey, by inserting the registration of at least more than two autoresponders into a form, to better understand the tastes of one's target user, asking the subscribers themselves to choose the autoresponder more suitable for transmitting what they would like to receive or what interests them most.
Generally autoresponders have contents that are completely different from the contents belonging to a newsletter.
In fact, while the main purpose of a newsletter is to position a company's brand more effectively in the minds of its target, autoresponders have direct sales as their goal and therefore, in the email marketing sector, they represent the main direct marketing channel.
However, they can also very well be used to organize branding campaigns just like a newsletter, because their contents can vary based on the sector in which the company that uses them operates, and based on what you have promised your subscribers.
So among the contents of your follow-ups you can include communications regarding the history of your company, or how you intend to improve the lives of your customers with your product and/or service.
It can also explain how much you care about their full satisfaction in order to have paying but also happy customers.
Obviously you will have to do all this with a view to perfecting your relationship with customers, especially from a human point of view rather than a commercial one, because always remember that business is done with people rather than with products.
One way to establish a more solid relationship with potential customers is to obtain as many registrations as possible from a registration form inserted in a landing page, but multiple ones can be created, such as collecting contacts obtained at a fair, through business cards with an e-mail address.
A follow-up can also have as its object a training course for a company's employees.
In the messages inserted in the follow-up you will not only have to ensure that the recipients of the courses acquire the necessary knowledge to improve their work performance, but also that you can obtain information directly from the opinions of the participants.
In this case, the follow-up has the aim of verifying the impressions of the participants, to examine the usefulness of the course, both immediately after the training course itself and on a subsequent occasion a few weeks later, in order to be able to compare immediate impressions with now consolidated opinions.
A follow-up could be used for the management of an accountant's clients, when it comes to common periodic standard obligations that concern all or a large part of the clients.
Or you could organize events, with refreshments, such as an open house, in a hall of a large hotel, or an open day at your company, where you can show what your company does and how it puts it into practice .
Therefore you will organize your follow-up campaigns, using all the contacts you will have collected from all the events reported, to which you can later propose interesting content, offers, discounts and promotions.
But an autoresponder, equipped with a simple immediate automatic response, could have the purpose of immediately obtaining a hospital discharge card, precisely to facilitate the administrative work of a clinic's employees.
With a follow-up of messages you can plan in a university to send a series of video courses, having as their object lessons for students.
A follow-up may have as its object the continuation of a relationship that began with a job interview.
In this case it will have to be planned very carefully in order to project your image one step ahead of competitors who have applied for the same type of job.
A follow-up may have as its object suggestions and advice on the use of products already purchased, or that one intends to purchase, and then also culinary recipes, pieces of fiction, quotes and memorable phrases from illustrious personalities.
But still with an autoresponder you will be able to manage customer assistance, entering in a list the reasons for the defects and the ways to remedy them, with times and guarantees, or the creation of a series of FAQs or frequently asked questions, or even you will be able to insert into the system a way to give positive answers to the doubts of potential customers who are about to purchase, and also a list of more in-depth instructions for those who have just purchased a product and/or service.
As already mentioned in previous paragraphs, I use my follow-ups to send the lessons contained in my courses.
In fact, I believe that sending an e-book in one go is not enough to make the public appreciate you, unless you are already a well-known expert in your market.
In this case, your e-book, in addition to educating and spreading your brand, could be a very effective sales tool, if in its contents you include all the links relating to the products, for which you will have entered into an affiliate relationship.
Obviously, in any case, these links must be inserted in parts of your e-book that are consistent with the sales object of the advertisement inserted.
While if you are not known, you would have no chance of using it to sell as an affiliate, because you won't even know if the recipients will want to read it.
But not only that, because if you are not known, sending an e-book could even be counterproductive and viewed with suspicion by your subscribers, who will legitimately ask themselves: "Why does this stranger offer us such interesting content for free, immediately and in just once, in exchange for just an email address, could there be something behind it...?”
In this case the only remedy to be able to distribute your e-book and start making yourself known and spreading your image and your brand would be to rely on a large company, such as Amazon, which would offer it in the top ten days for free, and then he would sell it at a price that would also allow you a profit, which I don't think anyone would spit on.
Choosing another path, with a follow-up of messages, containing a course, divided into lessons, with content integrated with very soft advertising, and sent when you haven't been on the market for a long time, gives you the opportunity to gradually make yourself known to your target audience, in order to gain trust and credibility, in order to be able to obtain as many sales as possible.
Essentially you should try to include content that engages your subscribers, whilst providing a platform to encourage sales of your product and/or service and visits to your website.
Therefore, it is very important that your autoresponders actually contain useful information.
I0 – The elements in favor of an autoresponder
In general, autoresponders are essentially like any other form of email marketing, but if they are not carefully monitored, customized for specific market segments, or not adequately thought through in the development phase, they can carry greater risks and produce lower returns .
Therefore it is often and wrongly stated that the use of an autoresponder software has only positive effects, that is, it is often said "set it and then forget you have it".
However, when you decide to invest your time and money in an autoresponder you need to consider not only the pros, but also the cons.
In this paragraph you will have the opportunity to condense most of the concepts exposed in the previous examinations.
I'll deal with the pros for now.
A) As far as the pros are concerned, after the initial setup and the necessary work of composing the contents of the messages, you will have created a channel that will put you in communication with your target, and which does not require a large commitment of maintenance and check.
B) With an autoresponder, in addition to selling, you will be able to consolidate your brand and therefore become a point of reference for users, subscribers and customers.
C) An autoresponder allows you to maximize the return on your initial investment.
In fact, after having obtained a good number of subscribers, who you will have converted into customers, you will also be able to acquire a good number of loyal customers who will be able to keep you for a lifetime.
And you can achieve this with initial investments tending towards zero.
D) Autoresponders represent an excellent solution for small businesses with extremely limited resources, and which would not allow the creation of a newsletter, which requires time and also economic resources to be dedicated to whoever should take care of it.
Therefore an autoresponder represents a great opportunity to create numerous online follow-up marketing campaigns, if you have little time and limited resources.
E) Compared to traditional e-mail marketing, and I cite again the example of the newsletter, autoresponders make the segmentation of your target market extremely simpler and at zero cost.
In fact, they can not only be personalized with the most unthinkable tags, if you use a latest generation autoresponder, but you could also, as already examined, propose multiple autoresponders on the same page or even in a registration form, with the aim to create an opinion poll, or ask your subscribers for information on the contents and possibly also the products and/or services in which they were most interested.
F) An autoresponder allows you, after having obtained trust and credibility, to acquire new customers, and to obtain new purchases from loyal customers, and this is the most sought-after part of a follow-up created with an autoresponder, because according to an economic law of a certain economist named Pareto, 20% of your customers will always be able to guarantee you 80% of your turnover.
11 – The elements against an autoresponder
The negative points of an autoresponder are not many, and some of them are even very questionable.
A) Follow-up campaigns organized with an autoresponder can jeopardize the sender's reputation because they are likely to in themselves result in a high number of unsubscribes, unopened emails and spam complaints.
All these reactions from the recipients of your follow-ups could make it more difficult to even open individual messages, not sent automatically with an autoresponder.
I am increasingly convinced that to avoid similar situations it is necessary to provide useful, interesting and engaging content.
And in any case, stating in general that an autoresponder can jeopardize the reputation of the sender, whether he has inserted valid content or content of almost no importance, does not seem to me to be a real point against it.
In fact, any work performed incompetently can lead to either the acquisition of a bad reputation or the loss of the positive reputation acquired in the past.
Finally, if you have been the victim of such an event, the continuous insertion of valid content, in addition to the immediate verification of the correctness of your behavior when you are online, will not be able to do anything other than make the situation of uncertainty temporary, with the possibility, even of a temporary block, to then regain the possibility of returning to carrying out your work as a marketer without problems.
B) The initial creation of an online follow-up marketing campaign can require a lot of work to create the contents to be included in the many messages of a rather long sequence.
In fact, this commitment requires several weeks to set up, for example, split testing, to test which object receives the most message openings.
Further work consists of monitoring, which is carried out with the aim of determining whether there are problems in timing or content, before being certain and sure of being able to start the launch of the automatic follow-up.
12 – How to do effective work with an autoresponder
Autoresponders represent an excellent opportunity to create email marketing results with minimal effort after initial development.
However, the key to success is to think through the message creation process and carefully monitor the program for the first few months to optimize it.
Autoresponders are one of the most popular and effective email marketing techniques currently available, if done correctly.
But how do you "automatically respond" in order to optimize your return on investment?
The following best practices should help you create a robust and successful autoresponder
A) Always include the recipient's name, not only in the initial body part of the message body, but also in its subject.
B) Make sure the recipients include you in their contact list in their best email inbox by specifically asking for it in your welcome message.
In fact, automatic follow-up messages, by letting things go their own way, run the greatest risk of being placed in the recipient's spam box.
In the long run, this can generate suspicions of spam on the part of the anti-spam systems of the recipients' servers, and could irreparably damage your deliverability, as well as perhaps widening the phenomenon with complaints about spam, cancellations and failures to open your messages.
C) Never exaggerate with the inclusion of offers, promotions and order requests.
I have already talked about it previously, but here only one concept remains to be highlighted.
It's true that the main objective of a follow-up is to generate sales and economic revenue, but if you overdo it, your recipients will unsubscribe right from the start of the sequence of your messages.
So avoid creating follow-up messages that feel like just repeated, direct sales emails.
D) Make links clear and visible and use hyperlinks: Make sure all links to your product purchase pages are clear and visible.
If possible, set links in electric blue and underlined for easy user recognition.
In web design it is generally inadvisable to use the words "click here" in a link, and even more so in email design since using such words carries the risk of being blocked for spam.
However, the latest generation autoresponders have within them the ability to test the risk of accumulating scores that could block your message for spam, before you can even send it.
Make sure your links are text links and not image-based as image-based links may not appear in all emails.
Or if you really want to do it, make sure that the text link is present under the image, so that the recipient can still view the link, in the event that the recipient's program, as all email programs now do, can block opening the images.
E) Use the customization tags, which the most current autoresponder software have.
So make sure you make full use of the features of your autoresponder, because they allow you to personalize and also better segment or target your target market.
F) Design an effective email message template
The first thing you will need to do is design an email template that delivers results with engaging content and leads to an effectively constructed page on your website.
Autoresponder follow-ups are no different than any other type of email marketing when it comes to applying the best strategies around content, design, landing pages, formatting, subject lines and spam protection, as well as optimizing return rates. conversion, deliverability, open rate, click-through.
G) Make sure your content is always current
Therefore, evaluate whether your contents are independent of the current general evolution.
It is absolutely essential to ensure that the contents of follow-up messages do not refer to events traceable by time or date.
Even if you haven't changed the text of your follow-ups for two years, users should still feel like your content could have been written on that very day you send it to them.
Avoid references to trends and current events.
Use events, references, and images that do not give rise to precise temporal references regarding the content of the messages.
Avoid images that include fashionable clothing.
Do not refer to seasons or holidays.
The basic rule of thumb is to create content that can be read at any time or date and that is considered timeless while simultaneously being considered current and important by the user.
Your direct marketing follow-ups need to be timeless tools, unlike newsletter messages.
H) Do not make any offers with expiring dates
Remember, when you are developing your autoresponders, that you cannot use offers and promotions with offers that are conditional on expiry dates or that feature products of which you have a limited number of stocks and which you will no longer present in the long term.
It seems easy to argue that you are someone who regularly updates your content, but the reality is that most marketers activate their autoresponders and then forget about them.
So every time you present new members with an offer that is no longer available, you risk frustrating users and damaging your brand through blogs, word of mouth and social media.
So try to include in your follow-ups offers, promotions and products that will be available regardless of when a user reads the email.
Or if you really have to make an offer conditioned by time, make sure that this process remains in the sphere of the relationship between you and the recipient.
But if you really have to make offers conditional on the number of products left, you can always use the broadcasting function, with which you can make a generalized and inclusive sending of all subscribers up to a given date, as in the example in which the messages, received in an increasingly shorter interval, they do nothing but invite you to purchase because as time passes and the number of available seats decreases, the price of the product or of the place in the webinar or open house will always increase.
I) Do not include any issue numbers in your follow-up messages
Even though you would like to do this to boast about your number of contacts, it is actually considered to be a terrible idea.
Except that it is possible that someone starts receiving your messages perhaps only from the second half of the series onwards, and that someone else only receives the first half of the messages.
These unfortunate events could happen for a variety of reasons, and can significantly impact the overall status of your sign-ups and the effectiveness of your marketing.
In these cases you could very well be considered a spammer and your messages end up in the spam folder, if your users have not already unsubscribed from the list.
Many follow-up marketing studies show that if you include sequential issue numbers, as the number of subscribers and messages increases, subscribers will begin to realize exactly how long they have been receiving your emails and may be more inclined to cancel.
Without saying that this happens normally, even if you don't add any numbers, but as a physiological rather than pathological phenomenon.
Therefore always remember to keep your contents and your thematic lines as if they were timeless, as referred to in the previous paragraph.
And this certainly includes not using the progressive issue number.
L) Use content that represents instructions for using your products for your customers and then insert them into the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and use them to create articles that are then read by your users, in the event that they wish to purchase your products.
Your list may normally be made up of users who have recently subscribed to another list relating to instructions or information about your products.
E molto probabilmente sul tuo sito web hai una grande quantità di contenuti che potrebbero essere utili per i nuovi utenti, ma che questi ultimi non conoscono perche’ non hanno avuto ancora tempo di visitarlo.
A good starting point is to take the content of the most frequently asked questions that your existing customers send you, or that already exist in your website's collection of instructions, as well as the content of articles or product-related information. and/or most popular services on your website, so you can use them to create your follow-ups dedicated to your current customers or those who intend to purchase your products in the near future.
If your website is fairly new, you most likely already have an idea of what the best and most important content is that a new user wants to know.
Therefore, you can use such content to ensure that your follow-ups are extremely interesting to the recipients.
M) The interval between one message and another
We have already talked about this topic in a previous paragraph.
Let's talk about it again to highlight some concepts.
It's important to plan how to space your email messages apart.
It is generally claimed to reduce the intervals between messages when you are at the beginning of the follow-up sequence, i.e. when subscribers are more engaged and more enthusiastic about receiving your information.
A gap of two to three days between emails is often considered ideal.
However, as you send your messages, some believe that it is better to increase the interval between messages so as not to risk annoying subscribers with too many messages, to avoid being defined as a spammer or having too many subscribers unsubscribe from the list. your list.
When you're towards the end of the sequence, five days to a week between each email would be sufficient to still be present in the minds of your subscribers, without creating unsubscribe problems or spam complaints.
I wouldn't really agree with these settings, but I'll talk more about it in the next paragraph.
N) How many messages should you send?
We have already discussed this topic as well, but here I would like to mention some opinions of people who have had an excellent following in the webmarketing panorama.
There are many guidelines regarding this topic, but also systems that force you not to send too many emails.
Some email marketing platforms will allow you to send no more than ten messages to avoid potential spam complaints and delivery issues.
Other companies find that twenty automated messages is the appropriate number to operate.
Most studies, however, establish that the ideal number of messages to send is between twelve and fifteen.
In fact, ten emails may not be enough to build a meaningful relationship with your new users, but more than fifteen can exceed the tolerance limit for a subscriber.
You will have to do some testing to really find out the best solution.
Starting with a dozen messages should be the optimal solution.
However, these theories are now part of the past.
In fact, your information might actually be so convincing and engaging that users might want to receive twenty or even more messages without ever complaining.
On the other hand, you may find that if users haven't taken up your offer or developed a relationship with you by the third email, it's not worth your time to keep sending them useless messages.
And in any case it seems that currently the state of the art seems divided between those who focus on automation and prefer to send few but good emails and those who think differently, and proceed with sending even daily and for periods in which the contents are completely distorted and diversified.
According to the first orientation, with automatic systems you can create market segments based on customer behavior, so you would be able to send emails only to those who are truly interested.
For those who believe that it is better to send emails more frequently, their thinking is based exclusively on economic results of a certain importance obtained and due to massive campaigns of email messages.
And so he believes that in general the more messages you send, the more profitable the list becomes.
In fact, this opinion perfectly identifies the problem, consisting not so much in the number of messages you send and therefore also in the shorter interval between one message and another, but in the contents you send.
I think in an intermediate way.
Certainly if you have created a newsletter and send one email a day it is clear that the quality of the contents tends to decrease, but if you send a message every two days for months and months, and which has as its subject one of your courses, it is clear that those who do not unsubscribe after the third or fourth message have clearly demonstrated their intention to remain registered for the entire duration of the course.
Therefore I have adopted another strategy, and that is, before sending a course of 72 or 130 emails, I do a small test with a basic course, so that those who sign up to receive the advanced course already know what the 'topic I'm going to explore further.
O) Avoid diminishing the quality of your offers
It's tempting to assume that you could incentivize your offers more in your messages by including high-quality products, and possibly offering additional discounts, but you could also inevitably end up tiring subscribers and customers.
It is also true that if customers have not accepted your offer when you send the first emails, although your offer may have been objectively defined as the best you have ever presented, it could possibly also be not judged to be up to their needs.
On the other hand, remember that if you offered a 10% discount to new subscribers and/or customers in the first email and then offered 50% to the same recipients in the tenth email, not only will you not change the recipients' minds, not only through the additional discount, you will make your product perceive a lower value than that of competitors' products, not only will you do nothing but tire your subscribers and/or customers from the first email, but this practice will cast a bad light on your image and they will they will never become the loyal customers you desire, and who purchase continuously.
You will need to balance your business needs when making these decisions.
However, building customer loyalty should always be a priority!
P) Pay attention to relationship monitoring
Autoresponders are normally equipped with a tracking function, which can give you a report that can provide you with very useful information on the behavior of your subscribers.
Thanks to these reports you will be able to make the necessary changes, in order to optimize the performance of your follow-ups.
Is there a follow-up where the open rate is particularly low?
Chances are, the content of that follow-up isn't that important to your subscribers and you just need to edit the content.
Is there a message follow-up where the unsubscribe rate is incredibly high?
If so, that content must be changed radically and immediately.
Are there autoresponders where the click-through rate is very high?
If so, that content should be emulated and repeated in other follow-ups.
Autoresponders represent an excellent opportunity to acquire data via email in real time with the aim of using it to immediately improve the performance of your online marketing follow-up plan.
Q) Schedule an overhaul of your autoresponder settings and content
The final best strategic solution for autoresponders is to never forget to check and update content periodically.
Your autoresponder program is always running in the background and is such a popular marketing tool because it requires low maintenance, that you may forget to check it, as it should be, to verify its settings, contents and perhaps change the images or insert new ones where there are none.
So set aside at least one day each quarter or semester to review your autoresponder settings and content.
What is the best way to remember that you need to carry out such a check?
Whether you use Outlook calendar reminders, project management software, or a smartphone app to send you reminders about tasks, make sure you set up a system that alerts you when it's time to check. the content of the autoresponder to make sure that everything is still working and convincing.
Certainly the most important feature of an autoresponder is that, after initially setting it up, it requires very little work and offers an excellent return on investment.
However, this does not mean that you should not dedicate yourself to checking it to examine its results on a periodic basis.
