What Is An Email Autoresponder

Email autoresponder might be one of the most powerful tools in a marketers tool belt. You may have heard that every online entrepreneur needs an email autoresponder. Which leads to other questions like what is it? Do I really need one? And of course at what point is it wise to invest in an email autoresponder? If you have ever wondered any of the above questions, then don’t you worry I got you covered.

What is an email autoresponder? An autoresponder is a software service that responds to email automatically. This software allows you to perform several automated tasks related to email. These task range from simple to complicated task that our preprogrammed by you and the software you choose. Some common options are:

Automated email response
Visual email editor
email marketing sequences
segmenting and tagging email list

Having a legitimate email responder will give you complete control over how you interact with your contacts, fan base, or customers. If having an active audience is the key to making money online, which I believe it is. Then building an email list with autoresponders is the door you need to unlock. So grab you lanyard because in this article we are about to open this door!

How To Use An Email Autoresponder Like A Pro

An Autoresponder in its most basic function will automatically respond or send prewritten emails to an audience or a list. This is the software that is behind email marketing and is sometimes referred to as a drip or email campaign. Not having to hire someone or personally respond to every email from a client contact or prospect is what makes an autoresponder service a no brainer.

Yes, an autoresponse software will save you tons of time and money since you won’t have to answer each and every email you or your employees receive. Imagine having to sit down at your desk day in and day out to make sure every inquiry is given the right information about what product or service you offer? Eventually, you will begin to dread communication to customers inquiries, and this can kill your business!

That being said, you should have business before getting an email autoresponder. Unless you plan on becoming an email marketer than an autoresponder might be where you start but ill leave that for another article. Now I know not everyone reading this is going to have a business but do you have the potential to create one? I think, yes, because building a business is only as complicated as you make it.

Online Business In 3 Parts

Products & Service
Customer & Clients
Sales Process

Now the intimidating idea of am I an entrepreneur and can build a business becomes a few simple questions

Can I create a or sell someone’s product or service?
Can I create content related to a specific niche or industry?
Can I use essential software to connect customers to products?

The idea here is by the time you are looking into an email autoresponder you already have an audience and an idea on how you would like to monetize that audience. Your audience doesn’t need to be huge, and the products don’t need to be yours. In fact, this is how most affiliate marketers start out. Affiliate marketers are converting a viewer into a sell they do this by using.

Landing page software
Email autoresponder.

How To Create An Email Campaign

Setting up a drip campaign will vary depending on your audience your industry and your goals. An affiliate marketer might use an autoresponder entirely different than a supplement company.

But what all email campaign two things in common:

To build an ongoing fan base known as subscribers that you can do business with.
Using email communication to bring a subscriber to an action point.

Note: That action might be to make a purchase but can be as simple as having a subscriber engaging with your content or build trust between you, your brand, and the customer.

The 4 steps to building a profitable email list

Get Subscribers
Build Know Like Trust
Promote to an email list
Prune segment and analyze

Get Subscribers

The best method for gathering subscribers is by a technique known as moving the free line. “Moving The Free Line” is an idea I got from the legendary marketer Eben Pagan. This method means offering a product or service you would usually charge for and give it away for Free.

Moving the free line is a great way to have people interact with your brand. The most effective way for you to move the freeline is to create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is giving value in exchange for an email address.

Think of what you could give away that would really help your ideal customer. For example, let’s say you are in the (how to train your dog niche) could you come up with a PDF about the 10 foods to never feed the family pouch? You could then use that very same pdf as a lead magnet to start building your email list.

Build Know Like and Trust

The truth is we need to check three boxes off in our subconscious before we can ever be sold on something. Those are, do I know this person, do I like this person and do I trust this person.

In internet marketing, this is called the know like trust factor. To often think I have a great product can’t wait for people to buy it now it’s on the internet. Wrong! You need to have a large number of people to see the product. But wait there is more because then you need to have a percentage of those people know like and trust you enough to buy!

The good news is the right email autoresponder will handle this for you.

Every time you sit down to write an email to your audience, your list will get to know you, your products, and brand better. When you send your email list helpful entertaining or motivational content there like for you grows. When you do this consistently over time, there trust for you increases.

Imagine if you had written every day for a year to your subscribers. After that much content, a portion of your readers will get to the point of being true fans and buying from you will be a no brainer. With an email autoresponder, you can ensure that your list of true fans never dwindles.

Promote to your email list

Now, why have people thinking your a really cool helpful guy is great, and all remember the reason you started the email list in the first place. You started an email list to make money you wanted to monetize your audience.

This is where promoting to your list becomes a lot like balancing on a trapeze. On one side you want to make money by promoting offers on the other you don’t want to come off a scammy. Some will say focus on building the relationship and seldom make sells others would have you promote until you burn your list completely.

I focus on doing both when I find a product that is helpful to me or others I know in the industry, then why not promote it? Especially if your audience that your writing for is interested in the same industry. It would actually be rude not to help out your list if you found a super helpful product.

Finding the balance will be entirely up to you. Your email autoresponders job is to make sure that your emails get sent to your list and opened. A huge part of having your email opened is the headline but also having a well-designed visually appealing email is essential. That’s why I suggest looking for an autoresponder with a visual editor it makes all the difference.

Prune Segment and Analyze

One of the most overlooked aspects of an email autoresponder is the analytics. Yes, you can see how many emails you sent how many where open and how many clicked the links in your emails. But having a complete understanding of what your analytics are telling you crucial to growing your list.

For example, when you see that one type of email design or headline gets a lot of click-throughs, you know that you should repeat that type of caption or email design. This is all about creating a faster feedback loop when you see what works you double down on it. When you see something not working or resonating well with your list, you know you need to improve.

When using an email autoresponder, you will have the ability to create a feedback loop and increase your skills at email marketing. You also can test everything and find what’s best for your list via segmenting. Let’s say you have two ideas for a catchy headline you want to know what converts more people, so what do you do? Easy just split your list 50/50 send half one caption and the other half the other caption. You will then easily be able to see who the winner is.

Segmenting your audience and testing different variables in your content is known as A/B testing. With an autoresponder, you can check any number of variables.

What headline works best
what length of emails works best
what offer rate works best
what images work best
or do images work at all

Testing and viewing your analytics within your email autoresponder will give you key insights that will help you engage with your list on a higher level.

Now you know what’s working with your list how can you really dial that in to make your email list a passive income machine. The first thing I would recommend is to prune the dead weight. The second is to make sure you are tagging your email subscribers correctly.

Most email autoresponders charge based on the number of email subscribers you write to. If you have a 1,000 people on your list and 700+ are regularly reading your emails you are doing great. But what if you have 10,000 and only 1,000 are reading regularly? Then you have a problem you need to prune your list asap!

Tagging may seem like a hassle or a waste of time, but I promise you it’s not. Tagging is merely segmenting your email list based off who your subscriber is or where they are in your funnel. For example, let’s say your main offer is a master class on how to train dogs. This is in the form of a membership site. You usually sale this course for $997 but you are going on vacation in a few months and want some extra cash, what do you do?

With tagging, you will know everyone who has already paid for your pup training master class so you won’t want to promote to them. You might also have people on your list who opted-in for cat training, so you don’t market to them. You target the people on your list who are tagged as dog lovers and haven’t purchased your master class yet. Through tagging, you can make sure the right message meets the right people at the right time.

P.S if you really wanted to kill it, you would segment your list tagged dog lover and test for price points. You could test for a free week trial a coupon code 50% off or even a cat dog training bundle. So before your vacation, you check the analytics on your email autoresponder and see what performed the best.

Maybe your free week trial got a lot of subscribers to try bust most canceled before buying.

Maybe the sale did great and even though you sold your course for 50% off twice as many people bought and made it worth your while.

Maybe the dog people didn’t go for the cat dog training bundle at all.

So now you know that the discount code is killing it. Now all you need to do is send the discount code to the people tagged as dog lovers who didn’t accept the bundle or the free trial. This way, you will be making even more extra income for your vacation. All it took was tagging segmenting and pruning the people who don’t read your emails anyways.