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giovedì 31 dicembre 2020

Don't undermine your e-mail marketing campaigns

In this blog I am showing you some email marketing techniques and strategies useful for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, which do not have significant capital to invest in surveys and market research and in expensive advertising, but which at the same time are effective because ' they can give you immediate and measurable results, with a small investment and without major risks.

But if you really want to have these results you must absolutely forget:

To spam, even if only with companies and not with private individuals!

If you believe that it is legitimate to send unauthorized emails to the whole world targeted with your product, and this only because you receive an unsolicited message from you every 30 seconds... then it means that you have understood nothing!

I'll give you an example: imagine you receive a visit from a representative who wants to sell you a supply that you may also need.

The salesman is 'nice, for goodness', he also seems prepared, but every time he comes to visit you, he knocks on your office door, instead of waiting for someone to tell him that you have freed yourself and that you are waiting for him!

Certainly a representative like this will never do a lot of business and will only cause annoyance: know that by sending unauthorized messages you make the same impression... you only have to lose... and in addition to not concluding good deals, you risk being reported to the Privacy Guarantor, with the resulting bad publicity, and end up on blacklists, or even be blocked by ISPs, including your own internet service provider, and you will gain a very bad reputation, so you will be forced to close up shop, because on the internet negative opinions travel at the speed of light!

Furthermore, unauthorized emails, in addition to being prohibited by law, are annoying and create economic problems due to investments in antivirus and the time that must be wasted distinguishing them from legitimate messages.

But there's more: in fact, consider that not all legitimate messages can be interesting... many will end up in the trash... if not in the spam box of the end user and/or that of the ISP (Internet Service Provider). (and you will have to apply very specific strategies, which you will find in the Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up, to prevent all this from happening)... let alone unsolicited or unauthorized messages or messages without consent!

But don't be discouraged, because there are more remedies so that you can send emails to companies, without having had prior written consent, to ensure that you do not have to suffer negative legal consequences.

We will talk about it soon at this point.

To use external email marketing services that send your messages to their contact database!

In addition to having no control over their lists, you will only be able to conclude a few meager deals... you will also be able to sell... but it's a long way from here to saying you can achieve success with services of this kind.

You may also receive complaint messages about spam, because often in the contract clauses there is a note according to which these external services do not give any guarantee and do not assume any responsibility for any actions for spam by the guarantor, considering that the messages sent contain your company logo and not theirs.

Also consider that once the message has been created, you will not be able to modify it, making any split testing strategy difficult and/or more expensive to verify the message that gives the best results.

It will therefore be impossible to create a good number of loyal customers, which is the main purpose of any production and sales activity.

To use external email marketing services that provide you with a database of names and addresses that you will contact via email!

You may encounter two types, without the price giving you any signal regarding professionalism.

For a first type, very professional and serious, you will be guaranteed the existence of the recipient's consent to be part of that database and at the same time to receive your messages, but by contract you will not be able to use the purchased contacts to send them promotional emails, with hyperbolic phrases or with references to discounts and prices.

You will only be able to send descriptive contents of your business, your site, and what you sell, forcing you to carry out promotional campaigns only on your website, perhaps being able to obtain a small turnover, but only in the long term and without being able to enjoy the results immediate results that only promotional email campaigns can give you, after testing their effectiveness in terms of message openings and conversions.

It's money wasted because even in this case it's difficult to create a large group of loyal customers, certainly not impossible, but it takes a long time... and if you have to make revenue in the short term... forget it.

There is another type of external service that does not require the same conditions, perhaps they are a little more flexible, but believe me you even run the risk of being reported for spam, because they do not give you any guarantee on the actual correspondence between consent and membership in the purchased database and consent to receiving your emails with promotional content!

In each of these types of contacts, the best solution is to obtain their consent to send promotional emails with a specific telemarketing strategy, in order to verify the contact person to send the message to and their email address, received with the purchased database.

It is certainly not a quick system like the one you could create based on a series of contacts to immediately send promotional messages, but it is certainly better than sending generic messages to get to know your company.

To use external non-professional email marketing services to send your messages to your database, created with effort, because:

You have no control over the mailings.

As there are new members, these services impose ever-increasing monthly costs on you.

If you already have a list created with another software you cannot import it into the service software if it was not created with double opt-in.

You can only manage subscriptions with double opt-in.

You could run into sending queues, which without any warning would postpone your sendings to an unknown date!

If one day you want to change your system, you risk losing some of your contacts!

Of course, if you have the necessary capital, these services can be very professional and allow you to save time and money instead of purchasing a server where you can install self-hosted autoresponder software.

The non-professional services can be used by those who are new to the internet, have a small list and do not want to make any significant investments on the web, being able to spend no more than 100 euros per year, including these services, domain name and web space.

There are also some external professional e-mail marketing services, which within certain limits, in terms of number of recipients, allow them to be free, as long as they accept that their target may receive advertising messages within the contents of the e-mails. email.

Naturally you understand that this solution, although economically convenient, is not in terms of professionalism in the eyes of your recipients, who may misunderstand or not understand the reasons why you may have inserted messages that are not very useful as they are not coherent with your editorial line or with the object of your business.

It is obvious that when the business grows it will be better to change the system, but with the necessary precautions so as not to lose the data already acquired.

External professional email marketing services are very attractive for companies of a certain size because they allow significant savings, they must be structured and designed to be used for Italy, therefore by third-party Italian companies.

Professional external services are also recommended for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, since on the one hand the standard services, which are mainly foreign, do not offer, despite having increasing costs based on the increase in members, an excellent service in every respect of view, while professional external services, despite having rather high management costs, guarantee notable results in terms of contacts and customers and therefore can be supported by all types of companies and freelancers.

To use autoresponder software from the self hosted category because:

You can now realize that the costs of external e-mail marketing services are almost similar to those you could sustain in the context of self-hosted autoresponder software.

The most obvious difference is that on the one hand you will no longer have to waste time installing software on your potential server and consulting and/or requesting assistance from the hosting service provider.

You will no longer have problems because you will have services available that will allow you to avoid the risk of having to deal with incompetent technical assistance, as often happened to me with HostGator.

In fact, I calculated exactly that in a year, what I spent was double the actual yield, due to the incompetence and the spasmodic and prolonged waits for days in search of an effective solution for the problems that the servers granted by HostGator they provoked me.

Not to mention the abusive and undue payment requests sent to my bank, and the money stolen for services no longer used.

HostGator is no longer the one that 8 years ago guaranteed a solution to your problem within an hour.

Now his assistants, with the excuse of turning to someone more competent than them to get the desired solution, do nothing but put you on hold, and at the same time dedicate their attention to problems that perhaps they know better and can highlight their competence in the eyes of their supervisors.

But not only that, because they still have to get in touch with 3 or 4 requests for assistance at the same time.

What's their little game?

Very simple, instead of ensnaring the customer with spasmodic waits before someone responds to the requests, they currently prefer, as a marketing strategy, to respond immediately, giving you the sugar, and then making you wait dozens and dozens of minutes, with the excuse that they have to consult with someone more competent.

The real problem is that HostGator is no longer the independent company created almost 15 years ago, but is part of a group owned by an investment company, Endurance International Group, which also owns others well-known hosting provider brands, such as BlueHost.

How to notice this?

It is sufficient to enter the support chat interface to verify that it is always the same interface, with the exact same typing problems, common to all the companies that are part of that group.

Certainly if I were American I would have sent a summons to court demanding damages.

But being almost 10,000 kilometers away they account for the lion's share.

For my part, I am also pushing to damage them as much as possible with my negative word of mouth.

But it's not just the costs and time losses of managing the server and installing the autoresponder software.

Even owners of autoresponder software have now doubled the costs of the license and annual updates.

There are even those who, like arpReach, produced in Great Britain, make you pay the famous tax on replacing the domain name, no longer used, with a new domain name, a tax which amounts to as much as 35 dollars.

Just think about the fact that, having had the possibility from the old owner to grant nine domain names, unlike the current owner of arpReach, who only grants two, one day I decided to change just one of these two domain names, they asked me for 315 dollars, because for them I no longer had space to install new domains in their database, considering that with my old 9 domain names I would have exhausted that space.

Naturally, in order not to succumb to such blackmail, I closed with them forever and changed platform, moving from WordPress to Blogger, therefore with zero costs on everything!

It's a shame that arpReach will suffer the costs of ferocious negative word of mouth, a natural consequence that those who reveal themselves to be greedy for money on the internet suffer, and who at the same time act by blackmailing others, in order to have undeserved economic advantages.


Your e-mail messages deliverability

Today I'm talking about the causes that can harm the admissibility of your messages

It can be said that there are at least three destinations for your email messages.

The first is the recipient's email inbox, and this should be the normal hypothesis, when everything goes well, but this is not always the case.

The other destination is the spam inbox, and this can give rise to problems in the sense that you cannot always and continuously force recipients to check the ever-changing rules adopted by email marketing services.

The rest of the messages are lost, no one knows how or where, in cyber space due to the fluidity of electronic communications.

And this is confirmed by recent statistics which have ascertained that at least 16 % of e-mail messages are lost, in the sense that if they are not on the server, if they have not reached the recipient's inbox, if they are not in their spam box and if it hasn't been returned to the sender, it must have gone somewhere, but we don't know where...

Other reasons that can invalidate an e-mail marketing campaign are messages rejected by the sender due to hard or soft bounces, for reasons such as causes related to malfunctions of the IP number, insertion of incorrect URLs in the message, blocks due to body and text contents. the subject of the message that cause software to react, such as, for example, Spam Assassin, or sending to non-existent addresses.

The first thing you need to check for the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns is to examine the average number of emails arriving at their destination or deliverability, an English term that has no direct Italian equivalent.

Once we have finally understood what deliverability is, another topic to explore is that the messages sent do not automatically go to the spam box, but that they go directly to the recipient's email inbox.

There are many tools that can help you increase the deliverability of your messages in recipients' inboxes and test whether this actually happens.

First make sure your sending server settings are correct, for example, by setting your SPF record.

Here's how Google clarifies the need to create an SPF record

We recommend that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain.

An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies mail servers authorized to send email on behalf of your domain.

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with spoofed sender addresses to your domain.

Recipients can refer to your SPF record to determine whether a message that appears to come from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

For example, let's say your example.com domain uses Gmail. You can create an SPF record that identifies Google Apps mail servers as authorized mail servers for your domain.

When a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether it is a valid message.

If the message comes from a server other than the Google Apps mail servers listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server may consider it spam and therefore reject it.

If your domain doesn't have an SPF record, some recipient domains may reject messages from your users because they can't confirm that the messages came from an authorized mail server.

Ends report from Google

Continuing on the subject of the discussion, it could happen that you are using a third-party email marketing service (such as periodic fee service providers).

However, in the latter case you have very specific limits on the amount of data you can have access to and it can be said that you have no control over the settings to be able to increase your deliverability.

Secondly you should do some testing with Spam Assassin or similar programs.

Consider first of all that the heuristic criteria for scanning the terms used in the subject or body of a message, for the purposes of attributing the spam score, vary depending on the algorithms used by each program that operates as Spam Assassin, so you cannot have the certainty that, if a message meets the score given by that software, the same message can be considered similarly by other software.

At most you will be able to set a default estimate, compared to the Spam Assassin criteria, to have at least a minimum of peace of mind regarding your deliverability and not suffer a complete block in relation to the contents of your message, even if it could happen eventually that the message may end up in the recipient's spam box.

You will have to check your IP number, and verify that it has not ended up on any blacklist.

Naturally, if you use a third-party email service, you will not be able to test all the IPs used, but you will certainly be able to send a test email message to yourself and verify the IP number actually used, obtaining it from the information relating to the message itself.

You will also need to check that the URLs inserted in the body of the message are not on a black list.

If all these conditions are met, you will be able to effectively isolate the problem of your deliverability in the context of your message and your marketing.

So at this point you can consider other tools to test any obstacles to deliverability.

Therefore, make sure that you are taking effective action to remove the causes of complaints from your members.

Subscribers who click the “I consider this a spammer” button, or similar terms, in their email programs have clearly indicated to you that they do not want your messages, and you should remove them immediately.

You must be very thorough and clear about what your subscriber will receive once they send you their name and email address.

At all costs, do not believe that you will be taken literally when you ask the visitor to enter their details in exchange for a gift.

This may be trivial for you, but not for many surfers.

Be simple and precise about the types of emails your subscribers will receive and the frequency of your mailings.

If your frequency is subject to change, it would be much better to specify this.

Keep your list clean regularly.

When a message does not reach the recipient and is returned because the address is rejected by the recipient's server, as, for example, in the case of a non-existent user or non-existent domain (so-called hard bounce), immediately remove it from your list .

If, however, the message returns for any other reason, for example, the user has exceeded the email archive quota, or the recipient's server is temporarily unavailable (so-called soft bounce), let your system ensure that the message has been rejected at least 3 times, in a relatively short period of time in relation to your sending frequency, then remove it from the list.

Your system should be able to distinguish between soft bounces and hard bounces: ArpReach (also if I don't use it anymore, because it's owner is a shark) does this job seamlessly by keeping your list clean automatically.

Never contact those who unsubscribe again!

If you offer a gift in exchange for the navigator's registration, it is still good practice to ask for confirmation of the registration with the double opt-in.

Otherwise and that is only with the single opt-in, you will be destined to receive numerous registrations with false addresses, from people who believe that the free gift will reach them immediately after registration, instead of receiving it with a message sent to the address email entered by them in the registration form.

Not to mention that on the one hand some of those addresses could also work, while on the other you would get a greater number of non-receiving addresses, and this at any server used, with the result that you could also be considered spam by any server that hosts those fake accounts.

In fact, a high percentage of emails rejected by an internet or web space supply service can lead to the blocking of your account or your domain, damaging the reputation of your IP number with numerous services.

Make a backup of your lists at least weekly or at most bi-weekly and keep the backup copy on your hard disk and on external magnetic media.

Don't try to hide the unsubscribe link from your list by placing multiple blank lines between the body of your message and that link.

Not only could this annoy those who want to unsubscribe, but many hosting services may take this as an indication of incorrect practices, and consider it against you in the case of any spam complaints.

Make sure the server you are using has sufficient capacity, during sending, to receive bounced messages at the moment the rejection occurs, and to process cancellations right at the moment you are sending messages. email messages.

If you were to make these operations difficult, with the forced use of your sending server, you could have quite a few problems, both due to complaints from users whose cancellation was unsuccessful, and from the receiving servers who they could block your accounts, domain and IP.

Likewise, you will have to be compliant and precise regarding the expectations of your subscribers when they ask you to stop your mailings.

Use split testing tools to test copywrites that may be more successful than others.

In your email account, enter, in the field assigned to replies, an email address different from the main address: in this way you will have a greater chance of being considered positively by many online service providers.

So you have to examine multiple entries to increase your deliverability, verify that your messages end up in the recipient's email inbox and not in the spam inbox and you will have to test several elements to try to isolate the problem.

E-mail marketing, graphics and targets

In this article I examine what are the most important elements in the structure of the graphics, so that your email marketing strategies are successful.

Are you clear about the purpose of your branding strategies through email marketing?

For example, it could very well be that you have not yet inserted elements that make you more easily relate to your users.

If you are sending a newsletter or a series of messages that have interesting content, but are intended to put your subscribers in a greater relationship with your brand, then you do not need to use in-depth statistical analysis regarding the clicks they direct to the pages of your website and the conversion rate into customers.

However, you will take into account the following elements:

checking the opening rate of your messages so you can be sure that the subject of the message and its content have been created in such a way that the message itself reaches the recipient's email inbox instead of the spam folder;

the evaluation of cancellation requests and spam complaints, in relation to your content, their positioning in the message, such as, for example, a position of the cancellation link that is too far away, at the bottom of the message, compared to the body, the formatting of the message and sending frequency;

you won't have to worry too much about link visibility, the number of links, or the massive use of images.

Therefore, if the purpose of your message is only to carry out a branding activity, you have the possibility of greater freedom in the insertion of your contents.

What if the purpose of your messages was to bring more traffic to your website?

In fact, it is equally possible that your business model is not based on the sale of products and/or services, but rather on the number of clicks that your site manages to obtain.

For example, if you sell advertising on your site, through the impressions obtained from the ads you have inserted, your revenue will be generated by the number of views achieved by the pages of your site.

This means that the aim of your messages or newsletter is to get as many clicks as possible from the content of your message to your website.

Therefore, if your aim is precisely to obtain clicks and views of your website, then the most important design and statistical elements on which to base your strategies is that of clicks from email messages to your website.

Of course, message opening rates, unsubscribe requests and spam complaints are always important for your email marketing strategies to be successful.

However, always remember that the most important statistics concern above all the click-through rate from messages to your website.

You will still need to focus your attention on the formatting, positioning and number of links placed within your message.

In fact, they must be clearly visible, made up of text and represented by a very convincing "call to action".

You will also need to make sure you insert a good number of links in the most visible part of the message.

Finally, as in most online businesses, the purpose of your newsletter or email marketing program is to create events that generate economic revenue.

After all, you still have to get subscribers to your list to open messages and then click on links that lead to your website.

And you need click throughs to your website to get events that generate your revenue.

And of course to achieve all this you need your target to always be fed by new people who want to be subscribed to your list so you always have new potential customers to sell to.

So you will have to take into account everything I have told you if you want to create successful email templates in order to make your newsletter or your email marketing program likely to generate events that lead to huge profits.

How to schedule an automatic e-mails follow-up

For many web entrepreneurs, the plan for an automated email marketing follow-up continues to be a mystery.

And you don't know which way to turn either.

You have never been so close to the doors of online success, but this, despite everything, continues to be a dream.

Evidently there is still something missing in your online marketing content.

You could certainly claim, and you will not be denied by anyone, that you have an aesthetically attractive blog or site, that you are very active on social media networks, that your contents are written according to the most classic copyright strategies, as well as being really interesting for your readers and have quality content.

You even have high visitor traffic on your site, well positioned in the most important search engines and for well-targeted search keywords.

However, your list is not growing at a satisfactory rate.

Furthermore, your site, as everyone knows by now, cannot alone achieve the sales you have set yourself, and in any case many efforts are achieving nothing.

You don't know which way to go.

Maybe you have the key to deal with the situation in your hand but you are really hesitant about whether and when to use it.

But the road you will have to face is not far away!

Just follow some simple steps.

And don't rely on others, you have to do it alone!

Otherwise you will continue to be at the mercy of indecision.

You have to face the situation and also make mistakes like everyone you are asking for advice has done, and who out of pride will never tell you what mistakes they have made.

So let's take a step-by-step look at everything that needs to be done to improve.

First you need to create the content of your email messages.

But don't ask me the fateful question: "Why should I create content before even having a targeted list to communicate with?"

If you think that people, immediately after seeing your site, will send you messages for information, in order to already suggest what you should write in advance, you are truly deluded!

The reality is very different, it is not the visitors who have to take you by the hand, but it is you, with your content who must take the initiative and educate your contacts!

Furthermore, you will have to create your content before having a list, precisely because it is necessary to target all those who will show interest in your site, through a process that you will have activated and which I will deal with now.

The first step to take is to insert an autoresponder software into your online system.

There are all kinds, as you will have seen in these pages, but I will soon go into the details of what I believe is the best software ever and which is very suitable for dealing with the situation: E-Mail Marketer by Interspar.

You can start creating your messages according to a very specific follow-up marketing plan, and here too you will surely have examined on this site what follow-up marketing is.

In this plan you will have to create at least 5 subsequent messages, set in a specific sequence.

The contents can have a content of this kind, that is, a series composed of a first introductory message, and then three messages, which address three different problems, or three messages which gradually address a specific problem, and then a final message which is read with interest by a good number of subscribers because it finally solves the proposed problems, with the final offer of your product and/or service.

In this way you will finally have the opportunity to create a large group of registered people who will follow your advice.

Once you have completed the series you will have 5 messages that will end up in your subscribers' email inbox, and you will no longer have to write any additional messages.

Step two: make signing up easy!

That is, each of your requests for action made to your potential member must be truly clear and simple as well as imperative, easy to carry out, without getting lost in useless words of kindness, which would, on the contrary, demonstrate your fear of losing their favor!

Your frank and clear request must correspond to positive behavior from the visitor.

The most important request you will have to make will be to sign up and in exchange you will give a course, or a free gift in PDF, with contents similar to the subject of the follow-up messages, or which more concisely describes the problem you will be dealing with. to deal in more depth with the messages, the purpose of which is then to redirect the subscriber to purchase the product and/or service that definitively solves your target's problem.

Please note that whatever the object of the gift is, it must have interesting and quality content, because there is nothing more harmful than a gift with scant or uninteresting content: always remember that people he goes on the internet mainly to get information and not to buy, and that the rule of "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" absolutely doesn't work on the internet.

In addition to the free gift, you will only have to insert a registration form on various pages of your site.

And if you don't have any need for a web designer, or if you are already creating your first blog, you can very well set up the registration form with arpReach and insert it within the pages, or in the widgets of the blog sidebar, perhaps created with a theme, for WordPress.

With Email Marketer you will be able to synchronize the registration forms with the server, where the autoresponder software is installed, in order to send each message within the times you have set in advance, by setting up a cronjob.

And you can automatically send messages to all new subscribers, easily capturing their data, and then also track subscriptions and their actions, according to the settings you have predetermined.

Third step: set up your messages

Once you have set up this system, the next step to take is to create excellent content to include in the messages, in order to obtain maximum results, because you will have satisfied the interest of your subscribers.

And to do this you will have to follow these guidelines:

– Insert a sentence in the subject of the message that specifically describes the problem you are going to solve, and sometimes choose the path of the paradox that is the opposite of the way to solve the problem: a trick that will make you more visible in the jungle of messages crowding the recipient's inbox.

– Create a message header that is consistent with its subject.

– Personalize the message with the subscribers' data, both in the subject and in the header, and then do not mention the subscriber's name again.

– Tell your subscribers who you are and what you are talking about in the message and why it will solve the problem and this I guarantee will bring the reader's interest to the maximum level of interest.

– If it is not the contents of a course, developed over more than 5 messages, which perhaps is still too early to be presented because you are not very well known (you could very well present it later, when you have a much broader audience), here you have to write short and concrete messages, you have to give the image of being someone who gets to the point of the speech straight away.

In fact, your readers don't know you yet and therefore don't want to face reading long messages.

Furthermore, with messages that are too long, even if useful, the always latent risk is that the reader thinks that what you write is interesting, but that he will go and read it later when he has more time... but then, in reality What happens is that not only is the message not read but it is also deleted.

This obviously on the one hand does not mean that your content must be ultra short, but on the other you could still create a short message that contains a link to a page inserted on your site or to a PDF content placed online.

Therefore the optimal solution is to insert the entire content you want to present to readers on your website.
When the reader clicks on the link to read the entire message he will be taken to the page of your site, where he will find the entire article that you have previously published.

This will help you write simple and short messages and will therefore find subscribers willing to read them immediately, and at the same time your site will have the benefit of receiving further visits, just like a real external search engine optimization tool.

In this way you will be able to combine in a magical mix the promotion of your image as a problem solver and the benefit of being searched for in the organic results of search engines, with the effect of improving the positioning of your interesting content in the rankings.

Fourth step: the final message

After giving your subscribers useful, quality content on how to solve their problem, you still have an opportunity to win them over with a final gift.

This way you will be able to have further positive results and your readers will be even more enthusiastic about being subscribed to your list.

All you have to do is create another autoresponder with arpReach, with a different series of follow-up messages, giving away free and/or offering e-books or other digital products for sale, which your subscribers will look forward to download and/or buy and then read!

In the final message, thank the readers again for their subscription (as you will have already done with the first message) to the list.

In the 3 previous messages you will have invited readers to send you their feedback!

So with the fifth and final message you will try to invite them, by setting up a kind of opinion poll, to tell you what they would like to receive on offer as an additional product and/or service.

It should sound as if you are suggesting bluntly and simply, “Now that you've solved that problem, what other dilemma would you like to face?”

In the end

After completing these 4 basic steps, you can also dedicate yourself to creating another autoresponder for a totally different list, you can go on holiday or spend some time partying!

In fact, your e-mailing system set up with an autoresponder like arpreach will work like an autopilot, solving the subscriber's problem, maximizing the effects of your search engine optimization work, increasing the number of subscribers to your list, and you will also have started planning, with the help of the members themselves, the creation of the product and/or service that they will want to purchase from you.

Further consequences

If what your subscribers want falls within your expertise and passion, you will be able to create the desired product and/or service without problems.

Otherwise you will proceed with the purchase of the rights to a PLR, i.e. content with private trademark rights, created by others.

Branded content refers to audio, video or written products that you can modify according to your needs and requirements.

You will be able to purchase private label products, limiting yourself, without further effort, to inserting your name as the author and possibly modifying as necessary.

You can use the content for anything you want to do (as long as it is within the limits of the license) for example, you can use the products as bonuses, you can extract the content and create articles, you can therefore use them to create your own product to sell right in the case in which you really don't know what to write in relation to a given topic proposed and expected by your subscribers.

If you can't find anything that suits your case, and maybe you know someone who is an expert in the subject, but who knows nothing about web marketing and computers, you can still collaborate with him fifty/fifty.

Autoresponder software features

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.