One of the most important parts of being in any business is communication with your clients, customers and could-be clients and customers. And when you don’t have an unlimited budget, sometimes setting up certain parts of your process to be automated can be useful.
When it comes to autoresponders, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it – and today, we’re going to talk about that.
Types of Emails You Can Send via Autoresponder
There are two different kinds of emails you can send when it comes to your autoresponder – broadcast emails and follow up emails. Broadcast emails are blasted out to your list(s) one time. That means if someone signs up a week from today, they won’t ever get that email, so if there’s something you want all of your subscribers to get, make sure you don’t broadcast it.
Follow up emails are where you’ll put your series emails in. So if you promise a 7-day course, you would create 7 follow up emails that get drip fed to your subscribers once a day for a week.
The problem with follow up emails is if you do a mix of those and broadcast emails. This can mean your subscriber actually hears from you more than once a day, and this can anger many of them and cause them to unsubscribe.
What NOT to Do: Here’s How to Piss Off Your List
You should never email just to send something out. Email when you have something important to say, a notification about a sale, or something else they might need.
Never sell or rent your list to others unless you have strict guidelines about this. Some marketers build up a big list and then give other marketers access to it for a fee.
Keep in mind that your reputation is on the line if the other marketer convinces them to buy something shoddy. You’re the one giving them access to it. Other subscribers will just be angry with you, period – for sharing their email address with someone they didn’t sign up to hear from in the first place!
Be very selective if you allow solo ads to be dispersed to your audience. And let your readers know that you’re allowing this but that you are not personally endorsing the products being promoted to them.
When it comes to your own product promotions, you have to learn how to provide value and not come across as a spammer yourself. Even if they appreciated your initial free giveaway, if you start spamming them with offers all the time, and providing very little true value, you’ll see hordes of subscribers leaving you for good.
Not only that, but they’ll warn others to stay away. If someone mentions your name, they’ll say, “That person spammed me all the time, so I unsubscribed.” That’s not a reputation you want to gain.
Building a list from scratch is mostly about sharing value. But it’s also about getting traffic to your list and treating them in a way that helps you retain your subscribers and get them to convert high for you when the time comes.
Best Practices for Email Communications
As your list grows, you have to keep people subscribed. You don’t want them leaving after just a day or two – or even a month or a year. You want them to be long-term subscribers.
That means you have to “treat your list like gold,” as so many successful marketers say year after year. And they’re right! Consumers talk, and the way you treat them will come up in conversations around the web.
Different people have different ideas as to what annoys them or what they’re looking for. For example, some people hold the frequency of communication to be one of the most important issues.
They don’t like receiving daily emails. So for those people, you need to give them the option to sign up to a weekly digest option so that they can maintain interest, but keep their email inbox free.
Frequency can be whatever you want it to be. If you don’t email often enough, your list will forget who you are and why you’re contacting them, which can be a problem.
Try to find that fine balance, which can be a couple of times a week, depending on your list and its purpose, in addition to what you promised them when they opted into your list initially.
