Action: Set Up Your Autoresponders

An autoresponders sends out a sequence of emails to your customers or prospects at whatever interval you want. Whether you use Automateyourwebsite.com, Aweber, Getresponse or Imnica, the process is the same.

Let me show you:

You can see here that I have circled the messages set to go out on day 1, day 10 and day 16.  When you use the program, you simply set the number of days between messages.

Here is the sequence of messages we have been training students to use successfully for the last several years. This sequence has since become a standard on the Internet for product purchase follow up. 

Write Your "Thank You For Your Order" Confirmation Email

The very day after people buy from you, you must send them an email asking if they had problems buying your product.

Some ordering systems send a canned letter that you can customize.  Others send no email and you will need to program this in your autoreponder.

The purpose of the email is to smoke out issues before they actually become problems. Your goal is to prevent customers from becoming irate. 

Here is an example of an email you might send:

Dear <firstname>:

Thanks for your order.

This email will serve as your order confirmation and receipt.

Product: (name of your product)

Price: (price they paid)

Shipping: (when they will receive the product)

The charge will appear on your credit card under the name XYZ CORP. Please make a note of our company name, so you will recognize it when the charge appears on your credit card statement.

If you have any questions concerning your order, please feel free to contact us. Your satisfaction is extremely important to us.

Email: (your email address)

Phone: (your phone number)

Contact: (name of customer service rep)

Best wishes,

Your name
Customer Support

Write Your "Stick Letter"

Write your stick letter

This is a NEW LETTER I have added to the sequence of outgoing emails I send after someone orders a product from me.  You will find instructions on writing your stick letter by returning to the control panel and clicking on the "STICK LETTER" icon.

The stick letter should go out either on day one or day two.  The purpose is to make your sale "stick" by re-selling the product or service to the customer. 

Plan Your Stick Phone Call (Optional)

Plan your stick phone call (optional)

This is another new link in the chain I've added. 

What you do is make follow up phone calls to your new customers to thank them for doing business with you.

They'll be surprised and delighted.

If you want, you can use an automated service that calls your new customers and leaves a thank you for your purchase message on their answering machine.  It's your option to deliver the message to all who answer, or only to answering machines.

This CANNOT be a sales call.  It MUST be a simple thank you. 

There are also new laws in the U.S. that may come on the books concerning the use of automated messages.  For the most part, these laws do not apply to customers who have recently purchased from you.  But if you use any automated marketing, you should stay current on these laws.

The alternative is to hire someone to make the calls for you.

Write Your "Free Gift" Email Letter

Write Your Free Gift Email

Write an email that offers an additional free bonus NOT promised or mentioned in your sales letters.

I originated and popularized the use of the "free bonus after purchase" method.  The proof I have is that only I know the original research the method was based on, which is a fundraising study that showed you could greatly increase the total dollars given over a lifetime by a donor simply by sending all new donors a well-planned welcome kit.

In addition, I had anecdotal evidence from a multi-million dollar seminar business I wrote sales letters for as a freelance writer. They found that when they greeted participants in baggage claim at the airport, they greatly increased the likelihood the person would buy additional training.

It's all about FIRST IMPRESSIONS made on new customers.  That's why you use a stick letter.  That's why you offer a free gift.  Or make a personal phone call.

Here's a screen capture of my free gift letter:

Write Your Upsell or Bundle Email Offer

Write your upsell or bundle email

After sending the free gift, you increase what psychologists call the response potential of your customer.  If you've studied The Psychology of Persuasion book by Robert B. Cialdini, you know about the studies that show a free gift increases the likelihood of a positive response.

I have seen studies where the free gift substantially increased response.

In this follow up email (or letter), you can:

a.  Offer an upsell

This is an addition to the order, like biggie sizing your burger order.  The typical upsell is for 25% of the price of the initial order.  That formula was established in the infommercial industry, although I have seen upsells work that were for a product much more expensive than the initial purchase.

b.  Bundle

You offer to CREDIT the amount of the purchase towards a larger bundle of products or services.

c.  Recurring billing

You offer the addition of an item for which the customer will be billed on a monthly or quarterly basis.

The amount of time you wait prior to sending your upsell offer is variable.  I send an upsell almost immediately upon purchase and another one ten days later. I've also experimented with several bundle offers.

I do this with a certificate that gives credit towards a larger purchase.

Set Up Your Customer Service Survey

Set up your customer service survey

I use two follow up surveys.  One is the survey I use to obtain testimonials.  That survey comes second. The first survey is to further identify customer service problems.

Here's an example of it.  You can use Survey Monkey or just a simple survey plugin on your blog.

Set Up Your Testimonials Survey

Set up your testimonials survey:

To obtain testimonials, you're going to send a survey email that requests an opinion on the product.

The purpose of the follow up survey is to make the customer respond back to you in their own words how happy they are with your product, and how it has helped them.

Studies prove that by getting your customers to articulate to you how your product has helped them, you greatly boost customer satisfaction, and even reduce refunds! For whatever psychological reasons, there is great power in getting someone to verbally, or in writing, state their satisfaction with your product.

For Amazing Formula, I got over 100 pages of testimonials just by using a little survey . I link to these testimonials because it's obviously too much to put them all on one page.

Today, I just have people post testimonials on our blog:

http://marlonsanders.com/testimonials/

I've seen other people deliver their product on a BLOG and then just have comments on the delivery page. That's a pretty slick way to get testimonials.

Set Up Your Referral Generation Machine

Set up your referral generation machine -- in response to the filled out survey, send back a link to a web page that allows the customer to refer 5-10 of their friends to you. You MUST offer an additional free gift for the referrals.

This is an incredible secret no one is using. Maybe they will after word gets out how I'm using it. But you read it first right here my friend.

You MUST offer an additional discount, incentive or free gift if they fill out the referrals form.

My psychological rule of customer behavior: To get customers and prospects to do what you want, you must always reward them.

If you want customers or prospects to fill out a survey, or do anything else, you must always reward them. I love using free reports or articles for this purpose. If you can't use free reports, you can usually write an article that will be of value to your customers. If you can't do that, then find inexpensive things you can mail to them that will be of value.

Notice that you ask for this help AFTER they have just sent you a survey telling you how great your product is.

They have just stated in writing how much they love your product, so it's a logical next step to refer your product to friends.

The great thing about the referral script is that it automates the process for you. You can find the referral script I recommend at RewardButton.com.

Again, automation is the key to everything I do.

Now get something here. It's nothing new to put the friends referral script on your web site. But that is passive marketing. I'm all about ACTIVE marketing. It changes the dynamics totally when you send out the email asking for the referrals after preparing the customer with the survey, and then adding in the additional element of the free bonus for referring friends.

The difference is we're using PUSH referral generation. We're not just sitting around on our web site waiting for someone to click on a link and refer someone to use.

We're going for it. We're sending out an email or sequence of emails that ask for referrals, offer a reward and then provide the technological tool to make it easy and painless to refer people to us.

In the old days we used a TAF or tell-a-friend script. You'll still find some around being used. The PROBLEM is that if people send out emails with your URL in them, you can be accused of spamming.

Enter the NEW BREED of taf scripts which are social based. So people share your link on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In with no nasty repurcussions. This is truly a thing of beauty.

NOTE:

Watch The Spam Rating of your Email

When you send out emails, it's a good idea to use the spam analyzer most of the programs have built in. I always make sure I have a 0 on the email.

I can also tell you I have a friend who owns one of the largest autoresponder companies and he'd tell you that those ratings don't mean much. So I don't put a lot of stock in these spam ratings. Still, here are a few simple steps that I follow:

Tip #1: Use the built in spam analyzer provided by your autoresponder:

Depending on the keywords you use in your email and the type of email you're sending, each letter in your autoresponder sequence or broadcast system will be assigned a "spam rating".

The higher the rating on your email, theoretically the more difficult it will be to get your mail through to your customers. If you can't get your mail through to your customers then your response rate is going to go way down.

Built right into the Aweber and GetResponse autoresponder systems is a "Spam Analyzer" tool that displays your SPAM RATING for every email you save in the system.

The rating system goes from 0.0 to 5.0. Anything under 3.0 is considered "safe", and anything between 3.1 and 4.9 is going to need to be edited to remove some of the problems and anything 5.0 or higher is probably not going to reach your customer.

Depending on what the score is, the analyzer will make a recommendation for reducing the rating and usually provides an indication of what's wrong with your message to have caused this.

When you're finished writing your email and it's ready to send, check the spam rating that appears next to the subject line (In Aweber.com) to see what score your email has been given:

Click the actual rating to see a breakdown of the points assigned, like this:

In this case the problem isn't caused by the use of actual "spam sounding" keywords like "free" or "make money" or "no risk" , which are the usual causes of high spam ratings.

The problem with this email is that it's being sent in HTML format and the ratio of HTML to text is too low.

This is usually caused by sending an HTML email that's made up of a large graphic image that has been "sliced" into multiple, fast loading pieces.

For every image on the page you've got one and a half lines of HTML code, so if you have 20 images, that's about 20 to 30 lines of HTML. So the system will report it as a low ratio of text to images, or low ratio of text to HTML.

To fix this, just open the HTML email you are sending then below your images you need to add some text. What I've done that worked well in the past is simply expanded my offer by writing more features and benefits.

Then just insert a few hard carraige returns before the text starts on the page, that way the thing primarily displayed on the customers screen is the eye catching graphic image, with the text below that.

After you write a few more lines of text below your images in the email, just hit SAVE, paste the HTML back into the autoresponder and check the spam rating again. You'll see it start to go down. If it's still not low enough, add some more text and keep going until you've got a higher ratio of text to HTML.

Here's a screen capture of the ACTUAL email I'm referring to when I'm talking about the large graphic image at the top, followed by the added text below:

Please Note: The "Marketing Dashboard" offer advertised in the email is no longer valid. This is a sample, example image only that I took from my autoresponder archive to help illustrate this tip.

Tip #2: Avoid using "spammy" sounding keywords:

The Spam Analyzers are pre-configured to watch out for the use of certain keywords within the subject line and body of any email message.

When they're found in a message, the software will instantly assign a numerical value to each keyword. Then when totalled up by the system, the final number ends up being your spam rating based on your keywords and the ratio of text to HTML.

Here's an example email I wrote with a LOT of spam keywords in it that ended up with a spam rating of 2.4:

Dear Friend,

If you're looking for a way to make more money
on the Internet, then listen up:

I've got a system that'll run on virtual auto-pilot.
You don't need to do anything. Just plug it in, then
sit back and watch the profits roll in.

I guarantee it.

Click here for more information

The rating on this email is:

If your spam rating is too high and you're sending a TEXT only email then you'll need to look at the results to see which words you can replace or edit.

What you do is double click open the rating number itself then follow the suggestions on the screen.

Here are the actual suggestions from the autoresponder based on the keywords used in the example email:

The listing at the top where it shows you the points and criteria show the problems.

They are:

0.4 points for the subject containing the word "FREE" in CAPS.
1.9 points for the body saying "Dear Friend".
0.1 points for saying "click here"

The items that have problems are listed in the email body in yellow so at a glance you can see what you need to fix and what you need to establish a "workaround" for.

To get rid of the 0.4 points, we take the word "FREE" out of the subject line, or at least use the word FREEBIE instead of free. I've also seen marketers say "at no charge".

To get rid of the 1.9 points for saying "Dear Friend", we use the variable options in the autoresponder to merge in the subscribers first name, like this:

Hello Marlon,

To get rid of the 0.1 rating for saying "click here", you need to say:

Go to the URL below for more information.
Visit the site below for more information.

If your email is rather long then you're going to end up with words you just can't find a workaround for. But that's okay as long as you can fix the majority of them which reduces the spam rating quite a bit.

I've noticed that as long as the spam rating isn't higher than 1.4, the mail usually gets through the spam filters. But that doesn't guarantee your mail will be delivered, which brings up to tip #3.

Tip #3: Format your emails correctly

Now this IS really, really important.

Get in the habit of writing emails that have no more than 65 characters to a line. Some people even write shorter lines.

If you write longer lines then you'll get really ugly line wraps when people read your emails.

Another really important tip is to watch out when you use URL shorteners. I personally use the budurl.com service sometimes to shorten my emails and track clicks.

The PROBLEM is that since so many people send emails with these shorteners they can get placed on blacklists and cause your emails to not get delivered.

The BEST practice is to install the "pretty link" plugin on your blog. This makes it easy to shorten url's yourself. The downside is that if you ever lose your blog or the databse it's build on, then all those links stop working.

Not the greatest thing in the world. So be aware of that. I had a malware problem on my server and had to dump the whole server. Now all the links I set up using prettylink plugin don't work. Kinda wish I'd stuck with budurl.com.

One more TIP. DO NOT TYPE YOUR EMAILS WITH ALL CAPITALS LIKE THIS. IN THE ONLINE WORLD IT'S KNOWN AS SCREAMING.

Just don't do it.

Tip #4: Track the open rates of your emails

If you send your email as html, you can track the open rate. What I do is just take my text email and paste it into the html box and make the link in the email a hyperlink.

That way, it appears to be a text email but will still track the open rate for me. I like to see the open rate of different subject lines I use, becasue that clues me into what my list is interested in at any one point in time.

Tip #5: Add a personal touch to your emails

Connie Green is one of my super affiliates. I love the way she starts out a lot of her emails with a little story. It makes me feel like she is emailing me instead of just blasting out an affiliate link to her list.

There are many theories about email. Some people like to send one content email for every pitch they send to their list. Others feel that's a waste and send all ptiches.

Some email their list daily or even 2x daily. Some email 3x per week.

The right frequence for you depends on your list. Experiment and you'll find something that seems ot work for you.

Personally, I send my ezine every Saturday which is a super duper piece of content. And I tend to send my pitches during the weekdays