You’ve heard of them, but you are not quite sure why you would need an autoresponder. Fair enough. It isn’t always obvious, especially if you have an ‘offline’ business. It’s kinda essential though, if you do any kind of ‘online’ marketing. But let’s look at offline retail in this post.
I’ve had an autoresponder (AR) for several years, but I probably don’t use it to it’s full capacity. I actually have 2 different ones – TrafficWave is my current main one, and NPN which I will bring into use soon (I’m concentrating on other things in NPN at the moment).
By the way, if you click through to TrafficWave, there’s a free report you can get about how TW can help your retail business. You don’t need to commit to signing up with TrafficWave.
Even though you may have a conventional, offline business – shop, restaurant, service etc – you still need an online presence, but that is not the purpose of this article. However, by having a website and/or blog, you can set up a short form to capture a name and email address. Then you have your list started and can send messages and broadcasts to your subscribers.
You can have a whole series of messages, all pre-written (by yourself or someone else) and loaded into your AR to be sent out at set periods. You may choose to do this once every 2 or 3 days, once a week, twice a month. You have the control, so if you have something you would like to say, you can say it.
You may also send a broadcast message every now and then, for example, if you have a special offer, to announce a sale period, new product announcement. You could send out a coupon code or run a contest of some kind to suit your business – and it may even help to keep you one step ahead of your competitors! So, if you are agreed that you need an autoresponder, then you will want to check out the leaders in that field before you commit.
Here they are:
AWeber, GetResponse, TrafficWave, (I deliberately haven’t put NPN in this list because it’s AR is not it’s primary business.) There are others, so run a Google search to find more. Most will charge a monthly fee, What you need to examine are the costs – how many lists can you have, and how many subscribers per list before you have to pay more.
One more thing you must look into is ‘deliverability’ and here is a page where you can find out more about that (yes, it’s a TrafficWave page): http://www.trafficwave.net/members/acmeinfo/delivery.html
I must admit that I’m comfortable with TrafficWave, and I can even offer you a free trial for 30 days if you click through one of my links and join – but bear in mind you will need to take time to set it all up, so use the 30 days to get all the training reports you can and have a good look round the site to find out how it all works.
If you would like to take advantage of this, please enter your details below:
These days you must take advantage of every tool and resource you can get your hands on to keep your business going and also expand your reach. Get your website or blog set up and then add an autoresponder to keep in touch with your customers.
