devote to doing small redundant tasks the more time you will have to
devote to primary business activities, such as: product development,
advertising, customer service, and list building. Or, you may want to
have more time for enjoying other things in life other than working,
so the more you automate your business the more time you will have
available to spend on whatever you desire.
Putting an online business on autopilot is not very difficult and much
of it can be done by simple using autoresponders to do many simple
tasks for you. An autoresponder is a software program that you pay
usage fees for, or that you buy and put on your own hosting account's
server. It is a program that responds to email inquiries from other
people with whatever you program it to send out. And it can also
easily be programmed to send out email messages that you enter into it
at whatever time you want. Therefore an autoresponder, abbreviated AR,
can be used for many purposes to assist in handling business
communication activities.
An AR can be used to promote your products or services and to get
people to visit your website. Just type or copy and paste your sales
or informational message into your AR and have it sent out to whoever
you have entered into the AR. Then, when a person receives your
message and visits your web site and makes a purchase you can have
your AR setup to deliver another message to them. The message would
thank them for their purchase and then deliver their product and
receipt to them.
You may also program it to give your customers detailed instructions
on how to go about obtaining their products and describing other
products you have to offer that they may be also be interested in
purchasing. In this way you have the ability to promote more products
and possibly make more sales. You can also program your AR to send out
follow-up messages a day or two after a purchase to ask customers if
they are satisfied with their purchase. This assists in building
strong customer relations and also gives you another opportunity to
promote more products while saving your time.
It will also allow you to make more "back-end" sales by using follow
up messages every few days. It is advisable to always include some
meaningful and relevant information in your follow up messages so your
messages do not appear to just be blatant sales messages, which most
people do not generally like or appreciate. The beauty of all this is
that you can be off doing something else while much of your business
communication activities are being handled automatically by your AR.
Autoresponders are great for training and teaching purposes. Many
college professors who teach correspondence courses set up their
lessons in an AR and then send them to their students at specified
times throughout the semester. And, because the courses being taught
often do not vary much from semester to semester, or from year to
year, the lessons can be set up one time and used over and over again
with only minor adjustments being needed.
ARs are great for providing training lessons to all types of groups.
For example, a 12 week training course can be written in advance and
then scheduled for deliver when the time is appropriate. The lessons
can even be set up to be delivered to different groups at different
time intervals. ARs are great for keeping members of an organization
informed of upcoming events, deadlines, and special offers or
promotions.
Promoting products for sale is one of the most popular uses of
autoresponders in online business. But when using an AR to promote
your sales just realize that most potential customers do not like the
direct "hard sale" approach and it has been documented that on an
average a potential customer must hear from you at least 7 times
before a sale is made. It is usually best to contact potential
customers in the first 2 to 4 messages with valuable information that
is interesting for them to read or use in their lives. It is good to
give away something of interest and value and to thank them for
subscribing to your email newsletter or ezine.
It has been said that the best way to entice sales is to build
interest slowly and start with an informative message about something
that interests your reader. And, when you do try to make a sale be
sure to focus on a problem or solution that your product or service
will help resolve for them. Gain their confidence by providing free
information that is relevant, accurate, and informative for them.
There are many AR services available and you can certainly find them
by doing a search with any of the main search engine services. Many AR
services will give you free limited service, but be cautious of these
AR services because they will put their advertisements on all of your
outgoing messages, or limited the amount of messages and subscribers
you can send to. These things certainly will not help your business
any. Be very careful when choosing and signing up with an
autoresponder service to use in your business.
