I like companies that practice what they preach.
A few years ago MailChimp published a blog post about their email autoresponder campaign.
Every day MailChimp gets new clients and MailChimp is looking to turn those new clients or users into power users. To do that, MailChimp uses an autoresponder effort and the results are impressive.
Of the people that signup, 33% opt into an autoresponder series to become power users.
Sure, some probably would become power users without the autoresponder effort, but that is pretty strong evidence that autoresponder programs work even for a company that helps people to create autoresponder programs.
What Is An Autoresponder Email Program?
An autoresponder email program, also called a drip campaign and some other names, is a series of emails triggered by certain actions a person takes on your website.
Autoresponders can be simple like when someone signs up for your email newsletter and they get an autoresponder email welcoming them and maybe including a few suggested pieces of content.
The program can take on many other forms, but the goal is usually to earn the trust of a potential customer over time so they become a customer and perhaps even a more involved customer that spends more money with your company.
We’ve talked before about how your website is your online salesperson. It’s always working for you to sell your products.
An autoresponder series acts much the same way especially if your sales process needs more engagement with prospects in order to earn their trust and business.
Why An Autoresponder Program Works
When you think about your sales process that occurs between a salesperson and potential customer it’s really an educational series. The prospect asks about your company, your product and how it can help them.
An autoresponder series of email is an educational process. In some cases, the process provides potential customers with information on how they can perform a task before they engage your company. By teaching them to do something you earn their trust and they are likely to need and engage your company for your product.
The reason to go through this process with an autoresponder program is that the process is often repetitive. Instead of responding to every email with your staff you can setup the program one time and then use it for every new prospect.
You can schedule each step to go out every couple days or whatever the normal schedule is like when selling in person.
A SaaS Autoresponder Example
MailChimp is an email service provider. That’s in the Software-As-A-Service or SaaS category, but let’s look at another potential example of how autoresponders can work.
Let’s say your SaaS company provides analytics for small business websites.
For prospects, an email autoresponder program could start by offering a free guide to the 10 Most Important Website Metrics For Small Businesses.
That’s something small business owners and managers want so they provide their email address and receive the guide automatically.
A few days later you can automatically have another email sent to the subscriber answering the next most common question your salespeople get for prospects at this stage in the sales cycle.
Salespeople often ask the question:
What are the main challenges with your website?
Often the response is getting traffic or getting better conversion.
With autoresponders, you can actually offer those two options and others and trigger a series of emails based on the response.
You can create content for each path a subscriber can take. You provide answers to their questions; guides that can help them with their challenges like a guide on getting traffic or on how to improve conversion.
And once the relationship is established you can begin asking more specific questions about website analytics until the prospect is interested in your analytics product. Then you talk about that and ask them to become a customer.
You can also create autoresponders for new users or new clients. That’s what MailChimp did. The goal was to educate the new user on how to use MailChimp and to turn those users into power users.
A Travel Autoresponder Example
Let’s change gears a bit and move into the travel industry.
The point here is that autoresponders can work for many different businesses in many different industries.
Let’s say you own a bed and breakfast.
For people that aren’t yet customers you can create a series that educates the prospective guest about the reasons to visit your city. You can provide all kinds of enticing information about what to see, big events and the best restaurants.
You can even provide them with a worksheet so they can plan out their trip. And after providing all that great content that is helpful where do you think they’re going to stay?
With your bed and breakfast of course.
And again, it can work with people that do book with your B&B. Once they’re signed up you can trigger an autoresponder series that provides them with all the helpful information they’ll need for their trip. Visitors always love that type of content and if you make their stay as enjoyable as possible they’ll likely come back again.
How To Setup An Autoresponder Program
All the major email service providers like MailChimp, Aweber and Constant Contact offer autoresponder programs.
But if you’ve never created one before it can be time consuming especially with creating the content. And before you create content you need to think about the content you want to create.
So to start, we recommend these steps:
First, map out the paths your customers typically take with you in person. Think about how customers find you and the questions they ask throughout the sales discussion until and after they become customers.
Second, once you have the different paths written down create ideas for content you can create for each step. The goal of the content is to answer the prospect’s question and to get them ready to move to the next step or question.
Third, now it’s time to create the content. You can do it yourself or with help from someone that has created content before. A designer can help you with the design of any materials and often with getting the email series setup.
Finally, your autoresponder series is “done” in the sense that you won’t have to redo the entire program, but you will want to analyze the performance. You might find that you need to change and tweak the content based on the success of the autoresponder program.
Conclusion
An autoresponder series is a great way to improve your business. It can put your online sales process on autopilot and will save you time in the long run and it can often have better conversion than other methods of online selling.
If you are interested in an autoresponder program and have questions check out the email services offered by Sarah Lynn Design and let’s have a conversation about how it can work for you.
