Your E-Commerce Site Needs An Autoresponder by Thomas Christopher

Okay, you've attracted people to your website. Why aren't they buying anything?

A lot of things have to go right for you to be able to close the sale. Here's an important one: you typically have to build a relationship in order to get a sale. You need seven to twelve contacts with people before they buy. To get back in touch with them, you need to collect their e-mail addresses and names.

If what you're trying to sell has a really high price, you can personally get in touch with enough people who showed up at your website to make a living. For lower-priced items, you use an auto responder.

An auto responder does four things: it maintains the email list, it collects sign-ups, it allows you to send follow-up messages after the sign up, and it allows you to broadcast messages at chosen times to the people on the list.

An auto responder service allows you to set up a mailing list -- actually any number of mailing lists. You can design a sign-up form for a list, and the service will create the HTML code for it. You cut and paste that into your webpage and collect sign-ups.

You get to create a sequence of follow-up messages for the list. Typically the first one is sent immediately after somebody joins the list. The subsequent messages are sent a few days apart. What you use these messages for?

The first follow up delivers the reward you promised them for joining the list. They're certainly not going to give you their names and e-mails in exchange for nothing. So you promise some information -- a special report, a mini course, some webpage templates, something... Subsequent follow-up messages, the seven to twelve that you need to make a sale, can pitch your first product. A while after that, more messages can pitch other products. The subsequent products don't take as many messages.

You can use broadcast messages for a couple of purposes. You can use them to pitch special time-limited offers or to advertise upcoming events. You can use them to deliver e-zines or newsletters, which may be what you are offering free in exchange for sign-ups or may be what you are selling. If you are offering a tele-seminar or webinar, you send broadcast messages with reminders of when the seminar will occur and instructions on how to join it.

Maintaining an e-mail list is important enough that we can say, "A commercial website without an auto responder is a website without a purpose."

Dr. Christopher is offering a growing collection of ecourses and ebooks showing speakers, writers, and self-employed professionals how to create income streams online. Dr. Christopher, a Colorado public speaker and seminar leader, prepared these in response to requests from the Speakers In Colorado group.

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