Autopilot email marketing is one of the best ways to grow an existing business or build an online business. With an email autoresponder, you can build a list of subscribers from a website. You can also automate a marketing campaign to your subscribers. It’s a simple and straight forward way to collect prospective customers; and keep in touch with them through a series of email messages.
Online business owners know the value of building relationships. Since many of them don’t even see their customers personally, “in the flesh”. So using email is their best tool for doing this. Plus, it’s a system which can be scaled up to an ever growing audience. Whereas scaling up personal relationships is a much more difficult challenge!
Using An Autopilot Email Marketing “Autoresponder”
An autoresponder software lets you place some code on your website and collect your visitor’s email address through a form. Usually the website owner will offer some kind of free giveaway to encourage their visitors to opt-in. This email then joins the database of all your subscribers. You can then automate a number of campaigns or series of emails to be sent out to your subscribers.
Online business owners use this strategy to build a huge list of subscribers: into the tens of thousands. They can then send out a single email and sell hundreds if not thousands of digital products simultaneously. The advantage of digital products is that they can be sold to anyone globally, regardless of their location. Physical products have more limitations and you, or a distribution company need to physically post out the product/s.
As many business owners know, people won’t keep opening your emails unless you have proved yourself to offer some legitimate value, or your subscribers are hungry for your product already. So the main focus for many who use autoresponders is offering value to their subscribers. 1000 people who are hungry for the next email, are potentially worth far more than a list of 10,000 who don’t open any!
So to keep your subscribers interested, it’s a good idea to build relationships through your emails. How you do this depends on you, your particular business model and your products and/or service.
Autopilot Email Marketing – Extending The Sale “Window”
On a website, your visitors only have a small “window” of opportunity to see the value of your products or service, and make a purchasing decision. This is fine when they come to your website as a hungry buyer, knowing what you are selling. But perhaps they are just browsing. Or, they might not know the full value of what your products can offer them. Some people will also want to gather information before they make a purchasing decision. They might even buy from a competitor, at a later date.
To make sure they have more opportunities to buy from you, you should offer some kind of incentive on your website. Many businesses offer a discount code or some freebie ebook or digital download of some kind. This encourages their visitors to opt-in to their email subscribers list. From here, you can continue contacting your subscriber and give them more value and information on an on-going basis. When they come to make a buying decision, they are more likely to buy from the person who has put in the most effort at building a relationship with them, and has already given them huge value.
Someone on a website has only perhaps 10 minutes to make a purchasing decision. Once you have them on your email list, this time period os extended into days, weeks, months and even years and decades.
Testing and Measuring Your Opt-in Rate
Once you have your sign up form on your website, you’ll want to try out different approaches to encourage your website visitors to opt in. This can involve adding pop-ups, giving away free downloads or even just changing the wording on your offer to make it more appealing. See increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website. By testing and measuring different opt-in offers, you can see, over say 1000 views or so, which offers are most appealing to your visitors.
Ideally, focus on promoting the benefits of your offer, rather than the features. Focus on WIIFM “what’s in it for me?” This can be a difficult thing when you know so much about your product or service. But ultimately the customer doesn’t care much about WIIFM! A short benefit driven heading can work the best to encourage your visitors to opt in to your email marketing campaign. And make sure your offer is clearly visible on every page of your website – not hidden at the bottom or somewhere which is difficult to see.
Opt-In Options To Consider
An autopilot email marketing campaign starts with your opt-in offer. So it’s important to make it clearly visible and of course valuable and congruent with what your visitors want. Most autoresponder software programs offer a range of pop-up, slide-in or “hover” forms which you can use to grab the attention of your website visitors. In some cases a pop-up is a useful way to do so. But there are downsides too.
A pop-up might slow down your website load speed, which in turn can affect your traffic. If Google downgrades your site for some reason, this will effect the number of visitors you can attract through blogging and creating content. Pop-ups can affect this because they affect the user experience. So it’s worth keeping this in mind if you’re considering using a pop-up lead magnet form.
