6 Ways Auto-responders Can Improve Your Marketing Results

Set up correctly, Auto-Responders can do a lot of follow up for your marketing team.  Let’s start with what an autoresponder is and how it works. It is a template based Email Marketing campaign that is set up using an Email Marketing Template Program (i.e. Constant Contact) with a series of follow-up Emails (say every 4 weeks) targeting segments of your target market (people who say yes to your product or service) with content that they are most interested in receiving.

1. If you are a speaker, influencer or use events or trade fairs to collect leads, setting up an autoresponder can keep you in front of people you have recently met and keep you top of mind while they get to know your product, service or specialty. Timed right, this method can save you time in phone follow-up and teach you what those new leads are most interested in purchasing or learning from your company.
2. By using template Email Marketing as a follow-up you can measure the interests of your Email Marketing contacts and provide more content that keeps them engaged instead of sending a sea of uninteresting emails that are largely ignored. Remember the key to effective Email Marketing Campaigns is sending helpful and relevant content, to interested parties, that helps them (the recipient) not just your sales team. When strategized to be more helpful, sales and favorable impressions of your company rise.
3. Segmented marketing is effective but it requires you to take the time to categorize your list based on the interest of your contacts. If you enter data with relevant topics of interests (products or services they are interested in as well as the type of company or individual on that particular list) you can then edit the content to empathetically tie in with the recipient’s interests. When done correctly, those emails will have a significantly higher open rate (65% vs 13%) and those individuals will be more likely to stay on your subscribers list over time.
4. By creating a series of follow up templates, you can touch on more than one of your services and supply helpful content that leads your potential customers to select your company over the competition. These emails should not be self serving, but instead provide content that makes it easier for that person to make educated decisions and either save them time, money or provide them with information that they would have to search for online or try to get from the industry with a larger effort. This causes the recipient to be beholden to your Email.
5. Consider setting up an Auto-Responder series, for your most cherished clients or donors, in which you highlight what you have done lately and examples of how others have used your services or products well. It shows that you are helping your clients thrive and also lets others tell how well your company works. In addition, the recipients may be stimulated with ideas on how to use your products or services in another way. For donors, it may stimulate them to provide volunteer hours, in kind donations for items you need or share your progress with their friends.
6. Consider using Auto-Responders to identify the social media preference of your target market. When you set up your Email Marketing program measure the clicks to your social media links and create subsets of people who click on your facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube or other social media platforms. Then you can provide follow up specials, information and incentives to those social media platforms. Set up social campaigns that create downloadable content and sweepstakes or a coupon series that are offered to your social media contacts exclusively with an incentive to share them with their social media friends and contacts. This will grow your list.

For more information on running your own auto-responders or brainstorming a way to use auto-responders at your organization, contact Tailor-Made Advertising for a one-on-one online or in person consulting appointment to review and improve your efforts, or to help you manage your Email Marketing program or other online marketing efforts. For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit tailormadeadvertising.com. To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker for SCORE, SBDC, Constant Contact, Chambers of Commerce and Small Biz Groups on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net or call us at 310-791-6300.