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By Maria Rainier in Featured

spamIn many ways, spam is just a fact of life on the Internet. Many of us get the occasional spam email and have a filter to take care of it. Far and away, the most common example of spam is email spam. While email spam is easy to avoid and relatively harmless, if you’re running a website, you have to try and be more mindful. Spam accounts on forums or even in comment sections can be a real problem. Too many spam accounts can make your site look bad and make new readers wary. Here are a few simple tips to help you nip those spammers in the bud.

The Captcha

One of the oldest responses to spam bots is the captcha. A captcha is a basic response test used to ensure a human answers the question. Normally it’s represented by either an image including letters or a math problem. While a captcha won’t cut out users who are actively trying to create spam, it will keep out bots and that alone will cut down on your spam by a wide margin. Most websites require a captcha when creating a user account, but that’s not enough. I recommend requiring users answer a captcha every time they comment. It’s a little less convenient for the users, but it will do a lot to keep your site clean.

Zero Tolerance

This tip is especially true for forums. Make sure you have a clearly stated zero tolerance policy on spam. If ever you catch users spamming, new or old, ban them. It’s important that the community knows you take the issue seriously and may ward off a few potential spammers. Sometimes this works best if you can make an example out of someone, so at the first chance you get, ban the spammer immediately. Nothing is worse than having an interesting conversation thread ruined by a spammer. Forums, perhaps more than any other type of website, have a lot to lose from huge numbers of spammers. It’s also important to ban the IP, not just the account. While it’s not impossible for them to return when banned by IP, it’s more difficult.

Keep an Adequate Moderating Staff

The larger your community becomes, the higher the chance of being targeted by spammers. It will eventually get to the point where it just isn’t reasonable to keep up with it all yourself. This is where the importance of having a moderator staff comes into play. If you take a handful of dedicated users you feel you can trust and give them basic moderation power, your site may clean up itself. Often these moderators will agree to help out of pure love for the site. Make it clear that you’re looking for volunteers and are unable to pay them. You may be surprised by the community response.

Require an Email Address to Post Comments

Requiring an email address to post comments serves two purposes. The first is warding off spam bots and the second is forcing some responsibility. Often, when any portion of the anonymity of the Internet is taken away, spammers avoid it. It’s still possible to create an account for the sole reason of spamming your site, but it’s likely not worth the effort. If this does happen, make sure to take the email address and add it to a database before deleting the comment. You can then keep a record of this database and use its emails to cut down on spam of other websites you run.

Collaboration

Partner sites and affiliates are the lifeblood of the blogosphere. You can make use of this to avoid spammers using the database mentioned earlier. If you encourage your fellow webmasters to keep up a similar list, you can compare the two and end up warding off more spammers. With a large enough collective, you can create a joint safety net. This net works by protecting the other sites in the collective from any single spammer. While it won’t cut spam out completely, it will do a great job of cutting it back and requires minimal effort to maintain.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Elon University. She is currently a resident blogger at Online Degrees, where recently she’s been researching different Online Business Administration Programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

By Katrina Sawa in Featured

emailmktgAs a small business owner you’re probably doing a ton of things yourself in your business – some you need to do but some also that maybe you shouldn’t be doing, right? In talking with hundreds of entrepreneurs every month I find that the majority of them (you/us) struggle with our email inboxes…they’re overflowing right?

You’re either:

1. Overwhelmed with email and your inbox

2. Feeling like you’re tied to it or it follows you around (on your smart phone)

3. Confused on how to organize it better – the flow, the emails you need, the spam, etc.

4. Ignoring it all together

5. Wondering how you can ever take a vacation (or a couple days off) and NOT check in

6. Or you’ve got it down and thoroughly organized like a well-oiled machine

Well, if you’re NOT in the situation of the very last point then you may be interested to know a few things you can do to better manage your emails and inbox. After all, you’re wasting hours a month deleting and sorting through emails you don’t even need to show up in the first place.

The following are 4 tips I suggest to better manage your emails:

1. Sort and organize your emails – Use the rules option in your mailbox feature to send specific emails into their own folders in your inbox to start.

  • I send all the emails from my team (various VAs) to one folder so I can hammer out responses all at one time every hour or couple hours or so as it fits my time schedule.
  • I send all my email newsletters (the ones I do want to keep) to a newsletter folder in my inbox to read when I have time. Guess what? Rarely do I ever have time nor do I miss them!
  • I send all emails from particular people like my own coach, my mastermind or other group I may be a part of to their own respective folders to keep them organized and my main inbox less cluttered.

2. Unsubscribe from everything you really don’t need – Ask yourself, do you need it?

  • Like the Staples and Office Depot emails I was getting….I know when I need office supplies where I’m going to go to buy them, I don’t need reminders of where to go and I certainly don’t need to be tempted with special sales to buy stuff when I don’t need anything.
  • Or, the email newsletters you get that scream sales at you or that don’t have relevant content anymore for you; if you don’t want the person to know you’re unsubscribing them have them automatically sent to your trash folder.

3. Create template emails - For emails or information you send regularly, keep a folder handy with the most recent emails in it for easy reference and copying to save time on future responses.

  • I receive applications for complimentary strategy sessions with me from people every week and I send pretty much the same thing to each person to schedule their session, all I have to do is copy an old email, enter in updated dates/times available and press send.
  • I also send out information about speaking for groups or telesummits to organizers and event producers so I have an email ready to go with my speaker sheet in it which includes talk titles, bio, picture, references and logo in it so I don’t miss out on any opportunity that comes along because that information isn’t put together.

4. Delegate when you’re away – Find someone to check your email for you so you can actually take a few days off or an entire vacation without checking in. (what a concept!)

  • Use a service such as logmein.com so they can log into your computer from anywhere which makes it convenient for them and write out a cheat sheet for them for what to look out for when managing your emails.
  • My cheat sheet is 5 pages long but it covers all the bases and important emails that could come through and what to do with them so I don’t return to hundreds of emails responded to but not ‘handled’; there’s a big difference.
  • My team knows to text me on my cell with any pressing issues but there rarely are any when you have a team that kicks butt like I do. (That comes in time)

Follow these simple steps and you’ll be well on your way to Mastering Your Email and Inbox!

(c) Copyright 2011 K. Sawa Marketing International. Katrina Sawa is an Award-Winning Author & Speaker who’s helped hundreds of small business owners take dramatic steps in their businesses to get them to the next level in business, revenues & their personal life. Get her Free Entrepreneur’s Success Kit at www.JumpStartYourMarketing.com!

By Jerry Bader in Featured

So Google wants to decide for you what emails are important and what emails aren’t. See MediaPost’s ‘Around the Net’ at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=134756.

From what I’ve read one of the key filtering factors will be addresses or people it recognizes. It seems the Web has spawned this notion that the only people you should communicate with are people and businesses you already know. Linkedin and many other social networking sites follow the same principle only allowing you to connect to people you already know; or to those that you can get introduced to by existing contacts.

Sure spam is a problem, we all know that, but an obsession with spam that is not destructive can be easily dealt with by hitting the delete button or by using spam filters properly. Yes we all get lots of emails that we have to go through every day, but the idea that you should only deal with the people you deal with seems to me counterproductive and frankly, downright foolish.

We are all in business and we all want to grow and expand our businesses by not only selling our current customers more, but by selling new customers. Can a business survive in the long-term without new customers? Of course it can’t.

Anyone who has studied psychology, and when you get right down to it, sales and marketing are all about psychology, knows that ignorance, as in lack of knowledge, leads to poor decisions.
Everyone makes mistakes, the difference between successful business executives and failures, is the ability to learn from mistakes; the problem according to the Dunning-Kruger effect is not knowing what you don’t know creates an ‘illusory superiority’ – in short keeping yourself ignorant makes you feel that you know more than you actually do, and that’s what leads to poor decision-making.

I for one don’t want Google or Linkedin or anybody else for that matter pre-filtering what I should see, hear, read, listen to, or whom I should communicate with. We owe it to our selves and our businesses to think for ourselves, listen to as much as we can, and use our brains to decide if the information is valid or not.

Clients pay us to create Web videos that generate leads, emails, and phone calls that help build working relationships, sales, and long-term customer loyalty. If you don’t answer your phone or read your emails you may have just missed closing your next big client, and that’s not good business.

Thanks Google, but I’ll pass.

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design and marketing firm that specializes in Web-video Marketing Campaigns and Video Websites. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

We all hate email overload. Web-based email programs like Gmail have built-in smart spam filtering and advanced labelling, but you can still miss important emails if you receive hundreds per day.

In an attempt to solve this problem, Gmail software engineers have today launched the Priority InBox.

Basically, this is an advanced sorting tool for your incoming mail. Your new Gmail InBox will be divided into three sections: Priority InBox (unread), Starred Emails and Everything Else. Based on a variety of signals about the importance of an email, Gmail will flag it and move it to the top section of your InBox, giving it priority over all other mail.

For example, if you are in daily email contact with a person, Gmail will determine that emails from that person are important and should always arrive in your Priority InBox.

You can also manually promote or demote emails to/from your Priority InBox by using the “+” and “-” buttons provided. You can use filtering to control your Priority InBox and you can customize the three InBox sections to suit your needs.

The longer you use Gmail, the smarter the Priority InBox gets at sorting your mail. From the official blog post:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important ‘bologna’, or ‘bacn’. So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

In a side note, news of Priority InBox was leaked early, despite a strict media embargo that was meant to be in place until this evening. Maybe it’s just me, but a media embargo seem ridiculous in the age of social and real time search. A media embargo from Google, the foremost advocates of social and real time search just seems ludicrous. But anyway, I digress.

While internal Google staff and some BETA testers have been trialling Priority InBox for some months, the feature will begin rolling out to all Gmail and Google Apps users over the next week or so. You’ll know if you have the new feature if you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account.

By John Beaumont in Featured

What is an autoresponder? As the name suggests it is an automatic response email which is a very important internet tool.

You may have heard many people recommend them to you, but why use an autoresponder? To be honest the question really should be why? But rather how can you not use an autoresponder? In fact it is difficult to see in this day and age how you could build an active list without one.

Basically an autoresponder is a system for sending out emails on a regular pre-determined basis to people who have opted in to receiving your information. Sure you could type out an individual email every time someone contacted you but, hey, would you have the time or more importantly the inclination to do that?

By writing an email once you are able to send it automatically to numerous enquirers quickly and efficiently.

The disadvantage, of course, is that it is a general information email rather than a personal one. However in most cases this does not matter as most people require the same type of information initially.

You should of course word the email to sound as friendly and personal as possible. Your potential customer will hopefully contact you if they have further questions and you can then send them the requested answer via a personal email, phone or whatever.

So what should you put in your autoresponder email? Obviously pertinent information regarding the offer you are making and why they should buy from YOU but more importantly a “call to action”. You are building a business after all and you need to build up trust and a good relationship but you also need your potential customer to take ACTION.

Always remember that people buy from others whom they trust. Other things to put in your emails should be:

  • A thank you for requesting information
  • A brief explanation about using the internet for sales
  • How you can help them
  • How to contact you
  • Testimonials Etc.

The art is to spread out your information over several emails stressing different advantages in each one.

So how many emails should you send? It is a rough “rule of thumb” that, in general, people do not buy until approached around seven times. There is of course no limit to the number of emails you can send assuming that your reader does not request to be removed from your mailing list. This is an important point. If they do request removal then ensure that you carry this out immediately. There is automatic software available to take care of this situation.

The frequency of your autoresponder campaign is another important consideration. Personally I do not like receiving emails too often. To me this is counterproductive in as much as you can “over egg the custard” and put people off. However I know that other internet marketers disagree with me on this point and some even inundate their potential clients. So the choice is yours. Why not experiment with different timing of submissions?

My recommendation would be to send your emails at 2/3 day intervals initially. Long term you could also send reminders after 3/6 months and maybe again after a year. Often people’s circumstances change and whilst your offer may not be appreciated initially after a while it may become more of interest to them especially if their financial situation changes.

Bear in mind also that if you have several products you can automatically make different offers through your autoresponders. If they are not interested in product A then you can offer product B in the same niche. This might be just what they are looking for. Also you can use a few of the autoresponder emails to give free pertinent information to your contacts thus building up trust. Not every email needs to be promoting your offer(s) of course.

So where do you get your vital autoresponder? There are a number of companies offering their services on the internet so the choice is yours.

I like more Internet Marketers have found my preferred autoresponder through a matter of trial and error. The Most important thing is to find the autoresponder that works for you. So do a search and with due diligence, you’ll soon find yours.

To YOUR success

John Beaumont Internet Marketer

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By Anton Pearce in Featured

When you are launching an email marketing campaign, your goal is to become a familiar piece of your subscriber’s world. As you become familiar, your readership will begin to feel like they know you, and in time, they will come to trust you as well.

If you want readers to welcome your emails, build them so that your distribution list will be happy to receive your emails, and they may even come to look forward to your emails. Pay close attention to your content, and then pay close attention to the look and feel of your email.

7 Tips for Email Marketing

Remember that your email reflects on your company, so develop your brand, and be consistent with how it looks and what it says. If you do not want tot be perceived as a spammer, then do not act like one. Here are some helpful tips that will show you how to develop trust through your emails by paying attention to how they look and how they make you look.

1. Use a consistent sender name

When a recipient gets your email, they should be able to immediately recognize who you are. So make sure that your sender information is filled in correctly. Choose a name and stick to it. It can be your company name, your product name, or your online name, but for your readers to know you it must consistently be the same name.

2. Create eye catching preview pane

Most people are inundated with email, so make sure that when they receive your email they see something that will spark their curiosity in the preview pane. Give them just enough information to let them know that want to read more. By not properly formatting your email to make full use of the preview pane, you run the risk of having your email deleted even before it has been read.

3. Ask for feedback

Never send out an email that cannot receive a reply. If you have a prospect that wants to contact you the last thing that you want to do is make it hard. So, when you are creating your email find ways to engage your prospects with questions or a forum for a comment. Ask for suggestions, and encourage questions. Even if you get negative feedback, your prospect has done you the favor of offering you a way to improve your email marketing campaign. One of the easiest ways to find out what people are thinking is simply to ask.

4. Include contact information

Make sure that your email includes you company’s complete contact information so that your readers see you as a tangible company. Give your company a physical place, so that people can picture where you are. They will feel more comfortable about you if you have a real presence rather then just floating around in cyberspace. Always publish your contact information in the same place. So if you have a logo for a header and it includes your contact information, always send your emails with your logo header. By seeing your information over and over, prospects will begin to consider you someone that they know and feel comfortable with. So always print your contact information in the same location in your email.

5. Always include complete contact information in the footer

By always including your company’s contact information in the footer of the email, if your prospect becomes frustrated looking for an address or phone number, they will know that they can always find it in the footer of your email. When someone is trying to get in touch with you, it should be effortless for them to locate your contact information.

6. Always keep the same look and feel

People are comfortable with familiar things, and they do business with comfortable companies. By being aware of your brand and always having the same look and feel to you emails, you will become familiar to your prospects. Use your logo, colors and tagline to burn your identity into your prospect’s mind, and they will soon come to view you as an old friend.

7. Use a reliable design

Do not waste a lot of time designing your email. You need them to look professional and have good content, but they do not need a lot of bells and whistles. Keep your format simple, and keep your content rich, and in time you will garner the respect and trust of your readers.

For any marketing campaign to be successful, your prospects have to trust you. You have to make sure that your message works for the demographic that you are trying to reach. Keep your formats simple, so that your emails will look professional for all of your recipients. Pay attention to your format to make sure that you message appears correctly for your subscribers.

While content is important in email marketing, appearance is equally important. Remember these suggestions as you create your email marketing campaign, and it should be very successful for you.

For a free, no-obligation consultation, contact Anton Pearce via www.antonpearce.com. Set aside just 30 minutes and discover how you can use online marketing to get all the clients you need to fill your practice. Anton is an online marketing consultant who specializes in helping health and wellness professionals to market their services online.

By Graham Baylis in Featured

Today there are numerous ways to promote your products and services online and one of the most powerful is the email and the newsletter. However, it is very important that you have permission from the addressees or your mails will be treated as spam and will not be read, and will therefore be a waste of time. So, how what steps can you take to make the most of your emails and newsletters? Always make sure that you have a purpose in mind when writing your email or newsletter, as it is essential to know what you want to get out of the process? Do you wish to just give information, make more sales or is it just keep in touch with your customers? Whatever your reasons, ensure that you do not waste the opportunity and your time by following these simple tips.

The Emarketing List

Your first task is to obtain contact details. There are many ways of doing this, but a fairly easy way is to use a so called squeeze page asking for their information. You can sugar coat this by offering a free gift or a discount on their first order or something else. Tell them that you will be sending newsletters and always make it easy for them to unsubscribe this service if they so wish. Always make them feel that there is no obligation. Potential and existing customers are more likely to remain with you and buy from you.

Interesting and Factual

Always make information interesting but keep it factual. Do not ramble on and on about things not relevant to your business. Choose topics carefully and attract attention quickly, so do consider your target audience thoughtfully. Keep the reader hooked so that they will visit your website. Perhaps give a couple of useful tips or insights. Do not give the hard sell, people don’t like this and they won’t read your news so give them useful information about your products or services. Try to demonstrate how your products or services can enrich their lives. Depending on what you have to offer, tell your audience how your products or services work and how much you can do to help them. However, do make sure that you can follow up on any promises made as nothing is more disappointing or frustrating than being let down.

Cheaper to Keep an Existing Customer then Get a New One

Fact is, that it is easier to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, so look after your existing customers and keep them coming back for more. Using email to give special discounts to past customers can give your business a boost. If a customer purchases goods from a company and never hears from that company again, chances are the buyer will forget the name of the company. By keeping in regular contact with your customers means that they are more likely to consider you when looking for the products or services that you offer. This of course is good for business and if you give excellent service, customers are more likely to recommend you to their friends and families.

Choosing How Often to Send Newsletters and Emails

You can choose how often you send out newsletters but be aware of sending too many or too few, you need to get the timing just right. That way your customers will look forward to receiving their newsletters or emails. In the end, it is all about keeping your customers happy.

Graham Baylis – The use of newsletters and emails as a marketing tool is increasing all the time, but for those new to the medium, it can be difficult to know what to do and how to do it. Then of course you need access to the software applications that will actually send the messages out. For advice and help on both of these check out http://www.amdcommunications.co.uk.

By Dave Ashe in Featured

Forums are a great way of marketing alongside articles, email and blogging – there is no real way to compare all of these, they are just a different way of communicating. The big difference however with forums is that many many more people will see you and get to know you which builds trust as you interact with the community.

Forums have been around in many forms since the dawn of the internet, they provide a means of conversation with like-minded people in a community-driven atmosphere of helping one another with problems. If you don’t know how they work, let me just tell you a bit about them.

First off, you have to find your forum in your niche, the best way to do this is type in subject forums as the keywords (replacing subject with your topic) into a search engine. Once you have found one in the topic you’re interested in, with a nice community going on, registration is the next step.

Registration is pretty simple, its just a case of filling your details in and perhaps entering a captcha (one of those funny sets of digits and numbers that tell the site that you are not an automated spammer!) You may have to click a link in your email to register the fact that you own the email address you registered with.

There usually is many sub-forums, i would reccomend finding one that usually reads something like “introduce yourself” and post a brief overview of what you are about and say hello. I would advise against just registering and posting “buy my product now” or “come to my website” etc. type comments as you’ll end up with a flame war – if you dont know what that is please do a search on it as its not a nice thing to happen to you!

Get involved in the forum, post replies to people’s problems to help with any questions that you can – its a community-type feeling that you will enjoy. Forums which are busy have the advantage of many more people in the nich you are targeting, so you can find out about some really exciting new widget thing in your niche that is very important to you, and also reply and ask more.

Some forums have a specific buy, sell or trade section where you can sell your products, this is the place to be if you want to directly pitch your product. Another way of pitching your product is to enter links to your website in your signature, this is shown directly under each post that you make and is updated automatically – be careful however, some forums dont like this and will ask you to remove them. Some have rules on the size of images or links allowed, please read these before adding it.

Some of the more advanced forums that run vbulletin have private messaging which can be great to directly carry out business to people privately on the forum, i’ve bought many websites and domain names using this – some sites like digital point have itrader which is also a way of showing how trustworthy the user is in terms of buying and selling, similar to the ebay feedback system.

One last thing to remember, forums are a great place to communicate rather than a place to pitch-fest – if you want to advertise on a forum, but you cant find any other method other than the ones i’ve outlined, contact the owners of the site and ask for banner rates, this is a great way of getting in front of these people, then you have the right to freely talk about your product or service which is a huge bonus compared to advertising on a static site!

Dave Ashe runs Marketing Forums, a friendly atmosphere for marketers of all types – come along and register here.

By Ryan Deutsch in Featured

Another excellent Memorial Day weekend! Although I have to admit, I spent a little too much time thinking about email marketing (as I often do on long road trips in the minivan while my two kids are watching a movie and my wife is asleep in the passenger seat). On this particular trip I could not stop thinking about some excellent meetings my team and I have had with clients recently.

The overarching takeaway from all of these meetings is that email marketers seem to really be focusing on the strategy behind their programs. We’ve been spending more and more time with marketers on planning their digital programs — something too few email marketers are committed to. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of time spent reviewing email and campaign management technology (features) as opposed to the strategy that is meant to drive the use of that technology.

Consider my Memorial Day trek to Cincinnati to visit family. I was totally confident we would have a great weekend. Why, you ask? Simple: planning — a clear understanding of where we were starting, an agreed-upon vision for the trip and a concerted effort to get all the essentials lined up so that we could execute on the vision. Is your marketing team investing enough in the strategy behind your email programs? Here are a few questions to ask yourselves to be sure.

How do my programs compare to my competitors?

It is hard to get somewhere when you are unclear where you started. Just try to get directions from Yahoo Maps without entering a starting point. Email marketers need to look at four key areas to assess where their programs stand today (three internal and one external).

  1. Data — where is it and how difficult is it to access?
  2. Content — where is it and how rich is my content library?
  3. Programs — what are all of the current email programs being delivered to consumers or other stakeholders?
  4. Competition — do I understand what my competitors are doing? How does my competition use the email channel — what is their recipient experience around subscriptions, unsubscribe and transactional communications?

Do not take shortcuts on the competitive analysis; a clear understanding of how your programs stack up against your competition is the foundation for understanding where your email programs are today.

Do I have a program vision?

When my wife and I planned our trip, we spent the majority of our time discussing what we wanted the experience to be, what priorities we had for time with cousins and grandparent, and what a real “win” would be for the vacation, which boiled down to having the kids at the end of the trip kicking and screaming when we forced them to head back to Chicago. Email marketers should be committing the same focus to their strategic planning.

Once you have a firm understanding of how your business uses email and how that compares to the competition, it’s time to create a vision for what the email channel could be for your business. This vision needs to include specific success criteria so you can track progress towards your ultimate goal.

Here are a few examples of simple, trackable visions that we have seen clients develop in the last few months.

  • Marketing will own all email communications to our consumers; specifically, in 2009, we will integrate marketing communications into our transactional email and drive (insert specific conversion metric, revenue, clicks, ad impressions, etc.) per week and per month. Transactional email deployment will transfer to marketing and be in production no later than Sept. 1.
  • Marketing will increase conversion rates (click-through rates and purchases) by 35% across all email programs, solidifying competitive position and maximum leverage of the email channel.
  • Marketing will make testing a core element of our programs, including performing spilt tests on all subject lines and offers.

Do I have a clear roadmap for executing the vision?

Unfortunately, most marketers start putting together a roadmap before they truly understand where they are or where they want to go. Picture the 20-page vendor RFPs that are all about the “how do I get there” without defining “where am I going?” While selecting the right partners and technology is critical, it is not as important as the first two steps.

One of the real pitfalls we see with email marketers looking to take their programs to the next level is the lack of executive buy-in. This is usually due to management’s limited understanding of the vision behind the email channel. Vision development is essential for communicating to the company the reasons behind additional investment in email marketing technology and resources. You would be surprised how quickly companies invest in programs backed by sound strategic vision.

At the end of the day, marketers should invest as much in strategic planning as they do in the execution of email. Many companies have internal expertise to rely on, while others turn to their solution providers for help. If it has been more than six months since you had a serious talk about email strategy, I suggest you and your team walk through an assessment of where you are today, your vision for the coming year and your plans to execute on the vision.

With the growing consumer sophistication, the addition of new online channels and the advent of the social web, email marketers cannot afford to be tactical, rather than strategic, for too long.

Ryan Deutsch is vice president, strategic services & market development, for StrongMail Systems, a leading provider of commercial-grade solutions for marketing and transactional email.

By Tracey Lawton in Featured

As a solopreneur being able to follow-up with your clients and potential clients is crucial in growing and sustaining your business, and keeping a steady flow of new clients coming on board. However the downside is the time it takes to follow-up with each and every one of your contacts – after all spending all day following up with clients isn’t a good use of your time; you also need to spend your time on income generating activities and generating cash flow for your business.

So what is a time-starved solopreneur to do in order to maintain follow-up with customers and clients?

Autoresponders are perfect for automating your follow-up and freeing up some of your time. If set up correctly they will follow up with EVERY SINGLE customer who has ever purchased a product from you; or EVERY SINGLE subscriber to your ezine list! Would you be able to undertake that task yourself? The answer is no, you couldn’t, it would be impossible.

This is where you need to get smart and take advantage of technology to automate your follow-up. Create the systems and let them run on autopilot.

What is an autoresponder?

Put simply an autoresponder is a piece of software that will allow you to send email messages to people on your list. Don’t confuse this with spam or unsolicited mail though. These messages are sent to people who have already confirmed that they want to receive email from you; they have either signed up to your ezine list or they have bought a product from you. They have given you permission to email them as they have confirmed their subscription to your list.

The autoresponder is an email that is sent out automatically in response to an action taken by your customer/subscriber, and it can either be just one message or a series of follow-up messages that you set up to go out at certain intervals – you choose what those intervals are.

For example, you could set the first message up so that it goes out immediately someone confirms their subscription to your list, the next message could go out seven days later, and the final one two weeks after that. The beauty of using this system is that you decide how often and what messages are sent out.

The autoresponder doesn’t write the messages for you, you have to do that yourself, but the opportunities using an autoresponder opens are invaluable.

Once you’ve taken the time to set up the autoresponder it all runs on autopilot!

How can you use autoresponders in your day-to-day business?

There are many ways you can use an autoresponder in your day-to-day business, but just to give you a couple of examples:

Ezine Signup. When someone signs up for your ezine you will generally create an autoresponder that immediately gets sent out to them welcoming them to your list – once they’ve confirmed their subscription, of course! Add a second message to go out a few days later, and ask them how they found your free taste, what their biggest challenge is, or if there is a particular topic that they would like to find out more about.

Product Purchase. When someone buys one of your products create an autoresponder and a series of follow-up messages to ask them how they are getting on with your product, are they working through it okay, send them a ‘surprise’ bonus, or ask for a testimonial. Span these messages so that they go out over the course of a few weeks. If you offer a home study system set the final message to check in with them about six/eight weeks after they’ve bought your product to see if they were able to implement the steps, or if there’s anything they need help with.

The secret to autoresponder success

Even though your autoresponder may be going out to several hundred customers (or even thousands), don’t let that deter you from making your messages personal – let your personality come through in your messages, encourage feedback from your recipient, give them a call to action in your messages.

When putting your autoresponder and follow-up messages together write them as though you are writing to just ONE person. Think about the tone you use. Do you keep it informal? Chatty? Light? If you find this task hard pick a contact/client you know really well and imagine you’re writing an email to them. What tone do you use when writing to this person?

Go one better, and actually send your messages to this contact/client and ask for feedback from them. Chances are if they really like the way you’ve written your messages your other customers and clients will too!

I rely on my autoresponders to follow up with my customers, clients, and ezine subscribers – without them I’d find it impossible to follow-up and may end up losing valuable relationships.

I know that many of my relationships with my clients/customers have been established as a result of them replying to one of my autoresponder messages. I would find it impossible to make contact with each and every one of these people personally; the autoresponder does that for me, but then I am able to create a relationship with those customers who do reply to my messages.

Office organization expert, Tracey Lawton, teaches professional speakers, coaches, and authors how to operate an efficient, organized, and profitable business. Learn how to create an efficient and organized office in 7 EASY steps, and receive free how-to articles at http://www.OfficeOrganizationSuccess.com

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