LearnHub

The Use of Autoresponders

If you are going to use email as a marketing tool then you are going to eventually need

to understand and use a tool known as an auto responder. Despite the flashy high -

tech name, an autoresponder is a very easy tool to use and set up on your site. What

an auto responder basically does is sets up a method of automatically sending out a

message.

Here is a simple scenario: You are going on vacation and you want people that send you

email messages to know why you are not responding to your messages. An auto

responder can send out an automatic email message to the people that just emailed you

stating that you are away from the office.

Most of the time when we are considering marketing services or products related to the

horse industry, we will be using auto responders as a marketing tool on several different

levels. Autoresponders and the services that produce them have gotten so

sophisticated, that there you could easily set up an entire marketing strategy based just

on the use of them. As a matter of fact, many online businesses build their client lists

very quickly and easily using autoresponders.

Let me give you a good example of how an auto responder can work for you. Let's say

that you have a website dedicated to your horse related business and you decide that

you want to generate interest in your services. What you can very easily do is place a

little box on your web site that says something like " For a Free Report on How to Take

Better Care of Your Horse's Health, Sign up Here!" In that same box is a place for a

person to sign up for the free report where they would put their names and email

addresses. This is sometimes called a field. When they click the "submit" button, their

name and email address would automatically go to your email service. The email

service's autoresponder would immediately send them a copy of the free report (that you

have already written) through an automatic email. Now, the recipient gets their free

report and you have just gained another potential customer's name and email address.

Remember what I told you earlier, "The list is gold!!!" You will now be able to collect a list that:

1. Is generated automatically - in other words, you are collecting potential customers email addresses and retaining this list automatically!

2. Is specifically interested in something to do with horses, which means they will probably be interested in what you have to offer.

3. Will know you and who you are whenever you email them.

4. People that you can sell your products and services over and over to.

A Good Way to Find Something Out Before You Do It

OK so, assuming that you now understand what an autoresponder is and how to use it,

here is a darn good method that we use to determine if a product or service will work

before we implement it. (That's right, I said, "before"!) You see, it is a real good idea

to see if you have a market or crowd that is interested in your idea before you spend the

time and money trying to make something like an idea work.

So, let us say that you have an idea to sell a particular type of horse service. Just for

fun, let's say that you have a device that hangs on the side of saddles that looks as

though it is part of the saddle but it is actually a microchip. This microchip can be

tracked easily over the Internet and is a security device that can tell you where the

saddle is over the Internet by accessing a Website. That way, if the saddle gets stolen,

you can always find out where the saddle is. Now, that sounds like a pretty cool idea,

but before you spend loads of money on

production, you make a couple of small ads that run in a horse industry magazine. The

small ads do not cost that much to run and you would be well advised to run this ad in

several magazines and to keep track of which ones people are responding to.

You can have the ad state that you are offering a free report on a new technological

device that can track a saddle on the Internet no matter where it goes. Now, you can

find out one of several ways whether or not people are interested in this device or not.

The simplest method would be to have a website already set up so that when you ran

your ad you told people to go to your website and sign up for the free report. Once

they read the ad and went to your site, they would then submit their email address at

your website; your auto responder would automatically send them the free report.

The reason this is so important is that if you have a load of people reading the ad in the

magazine and then asking for your free report by giving you their email address, then you

know that you have a bunch of people that will probably buy, or at least, be interested

in your product. Not only would you be able to tell by the response, but you would also

have a load of email addresses to send your offer to once you finish creating your

microchip product.

There are other ways of doing this, but for this section, I have included this idea

because it involves an autoresponder. We will talk about the other methods of doing

this later in the course.

Setting up Your First Autoresponder

As it was with email, you will want to at first use a free autoresponder so that

your initial marketing expenses will not be so high. If you try these free tools out and

understand how they work first, then you will not waste time, money and effort trying to

learn how to use them. Also, later on when you upgrade to using a paid, professional

email service (See the names of these services and their Web addresses in our

references files.) you will not waste time and money trying to figure out how to use

them, because as we all know, there is a learning curve to everything that we do.

Setting up an Autoresponder with Sendfree!

Setting up your first autoresponder is just about as easy as setting up an email account

and, as a matter of fact, it is almost exactly the same. Got to the Sendfree website at:

http://learnhub.com/redirect?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sendfree.com Their home page looks something like this:

At this point, you may be wondering why Sendfree is free. With most free services on the Internet,

they will try to get you hooked on using their basic services and then later, they will try to up-sell you

on the premium services later on down the road. For years our staff has used the basic free services

of Sendfree for free and they have served us very well which is why we are using this excellent tool as

an online example and tool for your first auto responder.

The services they offer for free are:

· Unlimited number of autoresponders to use

· Easy html (This stands for hyper text markup language. Don't worry it is easy to use especially with an html editor and we will cover more on this subject in a later module)

· Mailing list management. This is where they will save your email list that you will grow for you. You can also save this list onto your hard drive which we highly recommend.

The next thing you should do after you have gone to the send free site is register. Click on the

link at their home page. It should look like this:

Click on the "Join Today" link.

The page you will be sent to should look like this:

Once you get to this page you will want to scroll down the page (We inserted the red letters to show

you what to do. They will not appear on the page.) At the bottom of his page, you will see another

agreement to read and a button that says," Basic Services". Click on that button.

Just as you did with signing up for an email account, you must fill in the fields to get your free

account. You must fill out the fields marked with an "*". All other fields are optional.

Note: You should use your new Gmail account that you created in Module 1.1 when you sign up for

Sendfree. That way you won't confuse your home email with your business email and if you get

spammed on your Gmail account who cares?

Here is a picture of what part of the sign up page should look like:

The very next page will have a list of subscriptions for you to get with check boxes next to them. Just

scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the button that says "Next".

The next page you should see will look like this. It should say Welcome at the top with the name that

you had chosen earlier. Here is what it should look like:

You don't need to send your friend an email. Just leave that field blank.

This is the next screen that you will see. You will then want to click on the link that says, "Member Help".

The next page that you will see is very similar to the one that you just left, except in the top left corner it will then say "Member Login". Click on that link. Once that you click on that link, one of two things will happen. The site may ask you for your Sendfree login name and password or it will immediately take you to a page that looks like this:

Click on the top center link. This link will take you to another page that will say "Add an Autoresponder". After you click on this link Sendfree will show and tell you exactly how to set up your autoresponder. Make sure that you read all of Sendfree's instructions because they will tell you in a step by step fashion how to set up your free autoresponder.

After you get your autoresponder, you will eventually come back to the main interface again his time we want you to click on the link in the upper left hand part of the interface. Like this:

Now, the page will have a box on it that will look like this:

Once you click on the button that says Edit Message you will be taken to the Sendfree message interface which will look like this:

Writing your first message

Now that you are at this point, you can write up a message or a free report. As soon as someone sends you an email through this system, your autoresponder will send them an automatic message immediately.