Saturday, October 01, 2005

Autoresponders

An Autoresponder is a system for automatically sending a series of emails to people.

An autoresponder can form a powerful part of your prospecting pipeline, taking some of the workload off you and increasing your conversion rate.

The autoresponder will automatically send the prospect a number of emails at intervals you set. E.g. they will get an email as soon as they opt-in, 1 a day later, another 2 days later and so on.

You can have as many pre-written emails as you like and they can be delivered as far into the future as you decide.

The autoresponder can be software on your PC or an online service.

These days, software on the PC is not recommended - you won't get the delivery high enough (because of spam filters and the problems of delivering to AOL, hotmail and yahoo) and you run a real risk of being blacklisted.

There are many online services but be careful because not all of them support sending a series of emails. Most of them don't allow you to have multiple lists on one account.

The one many professionals use and recommend is Aweber. This allows you unlimited autoresponders (lists) with unlimited messages on each.

Aweber comes with a user guide and is fairly straightforward to set up. It also allows you to create email capture forms without you needing to host a web page - this is very useful as it gives you much more flexibility in your prospecting.

Getting a decision

The main objective of following up prospects is to get a decision.

That decision can be:
  • Yes, I'm joining
  • No, this is not for me
  • Not at the moment

Any one of these decisions is clear and lets you know what your next action should be.

If you're making a call to a prospect, you want one of these 3 outcomes, otherwise you're going to need to call them again soon and risk pestering them.

If they are not saying yes, you need to decide what you're next follow up action needs to be.

If they say no, you need to know if it's a definite, permanent no or whether they might say yes if cicumstances were different. If you're not sure, ask!

You can ask, "No problem, Joe. Is this something you would consider in the future if circumstances were different?"

If they say no, they are a definite NO and you can archive their details in your 'definite no' file.

If they say "yes, maybe, probably, you can put them in your tickler system for 6 months time.

If they join, become a definite no or go in your tickler file for 6 months time, they're off your radar, you can forget about them and stop wasting mental energy on them.