Why Automation is Essential to Your Success Online


As you gradually build your business, prospects will initially be ‘small price ticket’ customers who may then become ‘larger price ticket’ customers.

Beyond this, some will ultimately become the kind of ‘major price ticket’ customers who according to the Pareto principle ‘pop out’ of the bottom of your sales funnel.

With every gradual move that your prospect makes through this process, the e-mail messages that you send them must change as they attain each progressively more profitable level.

For example, after they buy your first product, they may or may not take advantage of the initial upsell.

If they do not do so, then the first tranche of e-mail messages that you send them should promote the first upsell product that they have just turned down. Remembering that they need to see your sales message anywhere between 7 and 20 times, you should give them plenty of opportunity to buy this product by making the offer to them at least 10 times.

However, there comes a point where you have to accept that the reason they are not buying is something that you are not overcoming. In this case, after 10 e-mail messages have all promoted the same product without success, you should change tack by introducing a different product to the same customer.

Alternatively, if the customer did accept the upsell immediately after making their initial purchase and perhaps even other products besides, the next step is to promote an even more expensive product to them by e-mail. Once again, you should give them plenty of opportunity to buy this more expensive product, so I would recommend at least 10 e-mail messages focusing on the same product once again, before moving on to something different.

You must therefore have a series of outgoing e-mail messages being sent to your subscribers when they first join your list, followed by many, many more e-mail messages to them once they become customers who occupy various different levels in your sales funnel.

Furthermore, with each purchase that these customers make, it will be necessary to start a completely different series of e-mail messages because with each purchase, they are pushing themselves further through your sales funnel to another different level.

In short, an integral part of any well constructed sales funnel is an automated e-mail management system, because without this, your sales funnel can never work as efficiently or as profitably as you want it to.

For this reason, you must have an autoresponder system in place, and given that you want the system to work as effectively and efficiently as possible, it will pay you to use only the best.

Yes, you can of course use a free autoresponder, but from my own experience, I know that the more efficient your sales funnel system becomes, the more quickly you will outgrow a limited autoresponder system of the type that you might find for free.

In terms of spending money on an autoresponder, you have two choices, or at least in theory you do. However, because one option is so much better than the other, I would suggest that in truth, there is no real choice to be made.

Option one is to buy autoresponder software that you can install and run from your desktop or from your own web hosting account. The advantage of doing this is that once you have bought the software, you do not need to invest any more money in your autoresponder.

However, apart from this single advantage, there is a little or nothing else to recommend buying and using your own software in this way.

On the other hand, there are far too many disadvantages such as using your own bandwidth for outgoing e-mail messages, a general lack of flexibility and the likelihood that your software will fail to keep up with the latest autoresponder market developments. In addition, sending e-mail from your own ISP almost certainly means that you will encounter significant deliverability problems so that you will send lots of e-mails that do not arrive because the intended recipients ISP has anti-spam software blocking it.

Alternatively, there are web-based autoresponder systems where you have to pay a monthly subscription to use the service. Beyond this however, every advantage lies with this option because online systems of this nature offer almost every tool and feature that you could ask for.

They provide significantly enhanced flexibility in comparison to desktop or host-based software programs, they make all of the latest features and resources available as soon as they hit the market and with the right autoresponder system, you should have very few deliverability problems either.

The importance of this last factor should not underestimated.

If you convince a new prospect to subscribe to your mailing list but then because of your autoresponder, the initial ‘Welcome’ message never arrives, the only thing that can be said for certain is that this prospect will never become a customer.

After all, if they do not receive your e-mail message, how can they?

You need to automate as much of your business as you can, but you have to use the best tools to do so. If you do not, a significant percentage of your potential profitability will simply trickle away down the drain.

For this reason, there are only two autoresponder systems that I would suggest you look at, Aweber or GetResponse.

Most online marketers seem to prefer the former over the latter, but having used both services at various times over the years, I would say that they are equally good as one another, so you should go with the one with which you feel most comfortable.

Given that successful automation is so mission-critical and that your autoresponder system is the heart of your automation, you should not look beyond one or the other of these two companies to handle the automation of your business!

YOUR LINK