Why automation is essential…
As you gradually build your business, you saw in the previous chapter
how prospects will initially be ‘small price ticket’ customers who may
then become ‘larger price ticket’ customers. Beyond this, some will
ultimately become the kind of ‘major price ticket’ customers who
according to the Pareto principle ‘pop out’ of the bottom of your sales
funnel.
With every gradual move that your prospect makes through this
process, the e-mail messages that you send them must change as they
attain each progressively more profitable level.
For example, after they buy your first product, they may or may not
take advantage of the initial upsell.
If they do not do so, then the first tranche of e-mail messages that you
send them should promote the first upsell product that they have just
turned down. Remembering that they need to see your sales message
anywhere between 7 and 20 times, you should give them plenty of
opportunity to buy this product by making the offer to them at least 10
times.
However, there comes a point where you have to accept that the reason
they are not buying is something that you are not overcoming. In this
case, after 10 e-mail messages have all promoted the same product
without success, you should change tack by introducing a different
product to the same customer.
Alternatively, if the customer did accept the upsell immediately after
making their initial purchase and perhaps even other products besides,
the next step is to promote an even more expensive product to them by
e-mail. Once again, you should give them plenty of opportunity to buy
this more expensive product, so I would recommend at least 10 e-mail
messages focusing on the same product once again, before moving on
to something different.
You must therefore have a series of outgoing e-mail messages being
sent to your subscribers when they first join your list, followed by
many, many more e-mail messages to them once they become
customers who occupy various different levels in your sales funnel.
Furthermore, with each purchase that these customers make, it will be
necessary to start a completely different series of e-mail messages
because with each purchase, they are pushing themselves further
through your sales funnel to another different level.
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In short, an integral part of any well constructed sales funnel is an
automated e-mail management system, because without this, your
sales funnel can never work as efficiently or as profitably as you want it
to.
For this reason, you must have an autoresponder system in place, and
given that you want the system to work as effectively and efficiently as
possible, it will pay you to use only the best.
Yes, you can of course use a free autoresponder, but from my own
experience, I know that the more efficient your sales funnel system
becomes, the more quickly you will outgrow a limited autoresponder
system of the type that you might find for free.
In terms of spending money on an autoresponder, you have two
choices, or at least in theory you do. However, because one option is so
much better than the other, I would suggest that in truth, there is no
real choice to be made.
Option one is to buy autoresponder software that you can install and
run from your desktop or from your own web hosting account. The
advantage of doing this is that once you have bought the software, you
do not need to invest any more money in your autoresponder.
However, apart from this single advantage, there is a little or nothing
else to recommend buying and using your own software in this way.
On the other hand, there are far too many disadvantages such as using
your own bandwidth for outgoing e-mail messages, a general lack of
flexibility and the likelihood that your software will fail to keep up with
the latest autoresponder market developments. In addition, sending email
from your own ISP almost certainly means that you will encounter
significant deliverability problems so that you will send lots of e-mails
that do not arrive because the intended recipients ISP has anti-spam
software blocking it.
Alternatively, there are web-based autoresponder systems where you
have to pay a monthly subscription to use the service. Beyond this
however, every advantage lies with this option because online systems
of this nature offer almost every tool and feature that you could ask for.
They provide significantly enhanced flexibility in comparison to desktop
or host-based software programs, they make all of the latest features
and resources available as soon as they hit the market and with the
right autoresponder system, you should have very few deliverability
problems either.
The importance of this last factor should not underestimated.
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If you convince a new prospect to subscribe to your mailing list but then
because of your autoresponder, the initial ‘Welcome’ message never
arrives, the only thing that can be said for certain is that this prospect
will never become a customer.
After all, if they do not receive your e-mail message, how can they?
You need to automate as much of your business as you can, but you
have to use the best tools to do so. If you do not, a significant
percentage of your potential profitability will simply trickle away down
the drain.
For this reason, there are only two autoresponder systems that I would
suggest you look at, Aweber or GetResponse.
Most online marketers seem to prefer the former over the latter, but
having used both services at various times over the years, I would say
that they are equally good as one another, so you should go with the
one with which you feel most comfortable.
Given that successful automation is so mission-critical and that your
autoresponder system is the heart of your automation, you should not
look beyond one or the other of these two companies to handle the
automation of your business.
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