Autoresponders for affiliates

I’m sure you have heard that “the money is in the list”, well it’s a fact, and a good autoresponder will make all the difference to bank account if you treat your subscribers well, that is, give them useful information, not just your latest promotion.

Another point people don’t seem to realize is that an autoresponder can get your email past all those spam filters, I use aweber.com, and as they have a very good reputation the ISP’s etc out there know that email coming from their severs isn’t spam.

Anyway, I will go into this in alot more detail at a later date, for now please read what Greg Mee has to say on the subject in his article.

Thanks for the article Greg!

Neil

Autoresponders for affiliates

One of the most important areas of marketing, online or off, and this includes affiliate marketing, is in following up with your clients and prospects. Once you have their contact information you should stay in touch, sending something to them just often enough that they remember who you are, but not so often that they’re annoyed.

Of course, how often this is will vary. Once you’ve bought a house and finished the deal you probably won’t want to hear from your realtor about all the new houses on the market.

If you’re an electronics or video game junkie then you might be interested in receiving something every few days, especially if it’s regarding sales and deals.

The problem with following up is that it’s something of a pain to do manually, especially as your contact list gets large. Imagine the realtor with 1000 names on his contact list sending a Christmas card to everyone on that list.

And then came the autoresponder. This little software email widget is a godsend to anyone with a large list of names. Especially affiliates. First, just so we’re all on the same page here, let’s define a couple of terms.

Autoresponder – this is an email robot. It has no brains whatsoever. You send an email to the autoreponder address and it immediately sends one back to the address you gave it. Simple as that.

Sequential autoresponder – This is the same thing, except that it will send a series of emails instead of just one. It doesn’t have any brains, either.

The sequential autoresponder (and we’ll just call it an autoresponder and skip the first definition) takes a series of emails, that you (or your staff) write up, and sends them in a sequence that you determine. Remember that I said it doesn’t have any brains? That means that you have to determine the sequence that’s best for your business. Every day, week, month, whatever. You also have to write all of your own affiliate emails and manually load each one into the system.

A “book of the day” sequence will be far more frequent than a “how to buy your new home” or “New Cars from Ferrari” sequence.

As an affiliate marketer you’ll want to come up with a series of emails to promote whichever affiliate program you’re working with. If you’re affiliated with Amazon.com, for example, you might make a series of emails on science fiction books and call it your “SF Book of the Day.” Whenever anyone signs up for your list they will get the “SF Book of the Day” until the pre-loaded emails run out. Whether you have 4 or 400 emails in that sequence then they’ll eventually get them all.

Of course, since you’re an Amazon affiliate, each of those emails has your Amazon affiliate link embedded in the text.

Each of those affiliate autoresponder emails should be more than just sell, sell, sell. At the very least, you should do a short review of each of the books in your Book of the Day sequence.

I’m sure you’ve signed up for a few newsletters from various marketers. Most of the emails sent to those lists are from their autoresponders, except for those few that announce something launching right now.

Try to write every email in such a way that your reader will look forward to the next one. We’ve all been on lists that we quickly unsubscribed from, because of the hard sell or lack of interesting content. Your reader wants to know what’s in it for him as much as you do when you read your own email, so write accordingly.

And get your autoresponder going now!

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