No, certainly not another “the money is in the list” token email marketing post on Aweber. Don’t worry this is not that. In this post I want to focus on the multiple uses of email autoresponders for various types of businesses.
What I want to demonstrate is that no matter what business you are in, you can and should leverage email marketing to improve your sales, customer satisfaction and overall business results.
Email marketing is the most cost efficient and effective way to promote your business, hone and maintain customer relationships as well as track results to know what is working and what isn’t, something traditional media like TV and radio ads cannot tell you.
When executed manually, email marketing is free because it doesn’t cost money to send an email. However, businesses prefer to use email autoresponders as an email marketing tool because they are cheap, very effective and most of all save businesses gobs of time in executing their email marketing campaigns.
Much of this can be self explanatory, and may be something you already know about. But just in case you don’t, email marketing is the use of people’s email addresses to communicate and build a relationship with them in conjunction with promoting your business at the same time. It is an increasingly popular marketing method because businesses, large and small, are realizing how effective this marketing method is.
Why is it much more effective? Email marketing is the more preferred method of marketing because it is more effective than traditional and social media. A person’s email address is very personal and people guard their emails with their lives. Think about your own email ID. Would you just hand it to anyone just like that? Communicating with someone over email is more personal and repeatedly proven to be much more effective.
An email autoresponder is a tool used by businesses through which they conduct email newsletter marketing. Email autoresponder programs are web based programs that enable businesses to capture customer email addresses electronically or manually, correspond with them seamlessly and automatically, track various statistics such as email open rates, clickthrough rates (readers clicking on links embedded in the email newsletter) and various other analytical attributes.
The business intelligence you get with an email autoresponder is invaluable. You can use the data to split test different approaches and continue to optimize your marketing campaigns to achieve your business objectives. This is particularly important if you are trying to sell through your emails or bring customers and clients in your business.
You can set up email autoresponders to “auto respond” to your customer list, scheduling newsletters way out in advance to go out at a particular time now or in the future. You can also send a broadcast email message to your list anytime you’d like.
So the next time you get an email message from one of the email lists you are subscribed to, it could be a message that was written months and years ago to be scheduled the day you received it. It likely also went out to several others – but it certainly doesn’t look and feel that way does it? Not when it addresses you with your name at least.
You can segregate your email list in various ways so that certain messages only go to certain people, and similarly perform various tasks that allow you to slice and dice the information you have to better target your customers and clients and customize your communication approach and method depending on who you are reaching out to.
If this sounds somewhat confusing and overwhelming right now, a quick read about email marketing and email autoresponders can further help explain this marketing method and the program used to execute it.
Why am I writing about this today? Because understanding how email autoresponders work and its various applications can help you tremendously with your business. It will not only help you make more money, but more importantly automate the customer relationship and marketing aspects for you, saving you tons of valuable time in the process.
Whether you are solely operating online, offline or a combination of both, email marketing utilizing email autoresponders will enable your business to flourish. That is exactly what this website is about, to help you expedite wealth building without adding much incremental demand on your day to day life.
Here are just a handful of ways email autoresponders can be used in a variety of businesses. I have personally used these methods in the businesses that I am involved with.
Freelancers – Freelancers like tax accountants and wealth managers can leverage email autoresponders by scheduling out email distributions during critical times of the year such as tax deadlines.
They can also use the system to pre schedule value added messages such as tax saving and wealth management tips on a monthly or quarterly basis. Wealth managers can send out quarterly reminders to rebalance portfolios to their email list. The possibilities are endless.
Niche sites – If you own niche sites and have either your own or affiliate products to sell, you can use an email autoresponder series to automatically engage with your readership as they subscribe to your email list. I use email autoresponders to promote various affiliate products and my own ebooks on several niche sites that I own. Here is an example:
Sales – If you are in sales and you want to gather customer feedback to see how you are doing and what you should do to improve your business, you can send out an email blast with a link to a survey, or simply ask the survey questions within the email blast itself. Want to know what products and services your clients want? Send an email to the entire list and find out. This is exactly how I obtain feedback from my readership.
E-commerce websites – Keep your customers in the loop of new product launches, special offers, discounts and important company news. Use your email list to send out coupons, or seasonal reminders relevant to your business. I heavily used an email autoresponder when I was operating my e-commerce business.
Blogging – The use of email autoresponders is very much prevalent in the blogging industry. Many internet marketing bloggers will tell you that the “money is in the list”. In other words, in order to make money, you need an audience to sell to. An email autoresponder is a great way to seamlessly build an email list of potential customers and clients. This is how I use email autoresponders on my blog:
Brick and Mortar Businesses – This is where I see email autoresponders way too underutilized. I have done several consulting engagements for small local businesses and one of the quickest ways I add value is by setting them up on email autoresponders to start building their email list.
For example, hair cut salons can set up the system so that it automatically emails male clients to come in each month for a hair cut, or it can help dentists send out bi annual reminders for teeth cleaning. My dentist sends me a postcard. Can you imagine the time and resources, not to mention the cost, it takes to do that for each and every patient? God forbid the temp forgets? A computer certainly wouldn’t.
An oil change garage can send out automated emails every three months reminding folks to come in for an oil change. People have busy lives, both consumers and service providers/business owners. Why not leverage technology to better streamline everyone’s lives and operate more efficiently?
I also use an email autoresponder in my Dry Cleaning business, for example, having automated reminders going out to each customer right before winter to remind them to bring in their jackets and blankets. Similarly, one message at the end of winter to remind them to do the same before they stash the winter stuff away in a box.
Personal – Heck, you can leverage email autoresponders to send out an email to your entire list / email database wishing them a Happy New Year! Saves the manual process of having to remember who to send what to.
The beauty of email autoresponders is that it automatically plugs in the name of the person you are sending it to. So although one pre scheduled autoresponder email may go out to 10,000 people, each of those will feel you had sent it to them individually. How thoughtful. It’s magic 🙂
As you can see, there are many uses of email autoresponders, and this post merely scratches the surface. There is so much you can do with an effective email newsletter system, all within your fingertips and without incurring significant costs.
Aside from tremendous cost savings, there are several other advantages to using email autoresponders. You save a ton of time in marketing your business, you stay fully organized and for website owners you diversify your traffic resources.
Search engines are fickle and can turn their backs on your at any time. With an email newsletter system, you can ensure a certain amount of repeat traffic coming straight from your email list.
And perhaps the biggest advantages of all are that you get to build an email database or list of all your customers and gather business intelligence to understand what they like and dislike, and how they interact with your emails.
People guard their email addresses closer than anything else today. When you have someone’s email ID, you can develop a closer and more effective personal relationship with them. You can also ensure that you can stay in touch with them, with or without the existence of your business, website or search engines.
I personally use Aweber, a very user friendly system that you can get for only $20 per month. It is the cheapest and the most effective email marketing tool I have utilized in my businesses. If you don’t know much about email autoresponders and what they can do for you, I highly encourage checking Aweber’s website out and going through the material. It can be an eye opening experience.
So as promised, not a token post on creating an email newsletter with Aweber. That said, is there a need for one? What information would you like to read more about? I am an affiliate of Aweber and would be happy to answer any questions if you are contemplating using it in your business.
What are some other uses of email autoresponders? How are you using email marketing in your business? If you aren’t, why?
There is a new player in the pay per click advertising market, Amazon Product Ads, adding yet one more alternative to the pay per click ad market.
Google commercialized this market initially with the launch of Google Adwords, which is Google’s main revenue driver.
Find out how much Google makes annually in online ads in my post here. This revenue model was soon followed by numerous smaller players, and more recently by larger companies such as FaceBook, Linked and now Amazon.
What does this mean for the advertiser? As in most cases, the consumer wins from the increasing competition. Everyone wants a piece of the growing digital advertising market, and as more players enter the market, consumer advertisers should see more cost effective advertising options as well as freebies or all sorts.
If you are not familiar with pay per click advertising, it is a digital advertising mechanism where vendors / advertisers pay the advertising company a fee each time their ad is clicked by a web surfer. Here is an example of what pay per click ads look like on the FaceBook Ads platform:
Here is how pay per click ads look on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the highest floor (minimum amount) per click from what I have gathered so far. At $2.00 per click, they are certainly making good use of the highly “targetable” and relevant user community they have.
And here is how pay per click advertising looks on the Google Adwords platform
As far as I know, Amazon is the last big player to enter the pay per click advertising market. Like the others, the Amazon product ads platform is a targeted cost per click program allowing webmasters and bloggers to drive traffic from the Amazon website to their own websites and blogs.
As you can imagine, this service is particularly attractive if you are selling products on your website. Most people visit Amazon when they are interested in making a purchase. The Amazon Product Ads program allows you to intercept this traffic and drive them back to your own websites and blogs.
Why Amazon would do this is beyond my imagination. Any idea? Here is how the ads look on Amazon:
Regardless, there is a healthy incentive to get started. Amazon is giving away $75 in free pay per click advertising dollars, so take advantage of that offer if you feel like you can benefit from it.
The way I look at this is that I am getting $75 dollars in free advertising on a highly popular and credible platform. What do I have to lose if I exhaust the $75 and stop? I don’t see a downside. I have done exactly that in the past with LinkedIn through the American Express free ads promotion.
Pay per click is one way to generate traffic to your website or blog with the intention to make a sale or capture an email address through an opt in landing page. Personally I can’t say no to free exposure.
If you are selling products online, you don’t want to miss on this opportunity while the space is still relatively new (not saturated). You may be able to drive high quality traffic to your website relatively cheap compared to what the future may hold.
I know this because I saw how Google and FaceBook Ads evolved over time in terms of advertising cost / rates and effectiveness. The more advertisers joining the bidding war, you can expect prices to increase over time.
If you don’t sell products online, or don’t want to use this paid method to drive traffic to your web properties, the Amazon Product Ads offers one of the more lucrative opportunities I have seen in the pay per click advertising affiliate space.
As an Amazon Associate, you can earn up to $155 in advertising fees for each advertiser you refer to Product Ads. The best part is that there is no limit to the number of referrals you generate.
How do you earn this money? By signing up for the Amazon Associates program (their version of the affiliate program) and referring visitors to your website through your affiliate link. Each time a referred advertiser signs up for a new account, Amazon will credit your account with $5.
Once the advertiser gets started with the program, Amazon will credit you another $150.
You can read more about the terms in detail on the Amazon Product Ads Associates Referral Guide (look at the navigation menu on the left side) and the Associates Program Advertising Fee Schedule.
The Fine Print: If you read the program rules carefully you will see that for you to qualify for the additional $150, the referred advertiser must receive his or her first click on a live ad within 30 days of registration.
I have used the Google Adwords, FaceBook Ads and LinkedIn advertising platforms with some success, especially when the programs were relatively new and the market not so saturated.
Amazon Product Ads introduce yet another opportunity for an early mover to jump in and capitalize on the targeted traffic before the other sharks jump in.
This can be a great opportunity for you if you are looking to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog with the intention of making a sale. Even if you don’t sell anything on your website, as a publisher online, you have the opportunity to capitalize on the Associate program offer of up to $155 in commissions per advertiser referred to Amazon’s program.
I had some success with the Google Adword referral program that paid $100 per referral before Google discontinued it. The new Amazon Products Ads program looks good so far, and I plan on using it personally as well as introducing it to potential advertisers as an Amazon Associate.
Do you have any experience with this or know anyone who has? What are your thoughts?
Disclaimer: I am part of the Amazon Associate program. I will receive a commission from Amazon for every successful referral.
Congratulations to you if you have managed to follow, and more importantly implement, what we have gone through together over the last several weeks.
When I started the how to publish an eBook series my goal was to walk you through the entire process of researching, compiling, marketing and selling your eBook successfully on the Internet based on my experience selling now over 20 eBooks successfully on the Internet.
Over the last several posts and well over 25,000 words later, it’s been a fun journey and thank you for walking it with me. I’d like to finish this series by providing some final thoughts to consider. But before that, this is how we arrived here:
Post 1: How to Successfully Create and Sell an eBook
Post 2: How You Can Profit from an eBook & Why You Should Write One
Post 3: How to Research a Profitable eBook Topic
Post 4: A 4,000 Word Guide on How to Create an eBook Product
Post 5: Effectively Pricing and Selling Your eBook
Post 6: Marketing and Promoting Your eBook
Post 7: Establishing an Effective Affiliate Program
Post 8: Writing an Effective Sales Page
Using eBooks to Make Money Online Without Owning a Website or Blog
One Excellent Way to Successfully Market an Ebook on Amazon Kindle
How to Increase eBook Sales Exponentially By Mass Syndication With Smashwords
So once again, many congratulations to you. The ones that succeed in life in whatever they do are those that take action. There is a lot of information that has been covered in this series on how to publish an eBook successfully, well over 25,000 words of theory and practical guidance that now needs to be implemented (and maybe you have already started so even better).
I have poured everything I know in this series and you have everything you need to succeed with profiting from eBooks. How much you make and how much you succeed is now all up to you. But the beauty of it is that you are 100% in control of your own destiny. You can choose how well you want to do from here on.
And if you are thinking whether you will succeed, I’d say do not worry about it. Do your best and see what happens. As I often say, focus on excellence (in this case execution) and success is inevitably going to follow. Many people have it the other way around as they continue to chase success and never get there because the forget to focus on what’s important.
If you start to worry about the outcome right now, you might never get yourself to start. The Internet is very forgiving. It allows us to make quick changes as we move along so you will have multiple opportunities to continuously tweak and optimize your initiative as you move along with the process.
Don’t be too anxious about the results either. Success doesn’t happen overnight. But when it does, it tends to come in bunches like a waterfall. To give you some perspective, I didn’t sell my first eBook copy until 6 months into the process. I procrastinated with compiling the sales page and then marketing my eBook. But when I sold that first copy, everything started to snowball after that up to this point, and I am nowhere done either 🙂
Also understand that what you can accomplish with an eBook may just be a start to something much bigger. An eBook is a platform, or a stepping stone for many to get to their end destination, may that be a consulting practice, speaking engagements, political agenda, a big contract with a big name publisher or anything else. The possibilities are endless. So while you may think you have only learned how to publish an eBook, you have really learned how to effectively position yourself to achieve a potentially much, much bigger target.
You can also convert your eBook to an audio book or a video series, instantly repurposing content into new avenues which you can also sell online. The beauty of doing that is that once your information product is created, you can repeatedly benefit from it over time.
While publishing an eBook is one of the best ways to accomplish multiple purposes, such as building a brand name, subject matter authority and earning passive income online, understand that succeeding at this initiative is a PROCESS, one that we have gone through in depth together over the last several weeks. So execute the process, have some patience and understand that it is just a matter of time before you succeed.
I do my best to answer all questions and comments left on this blog, so please come back and ask questions as well as share your thoughts and concerns.
On a final note, as I have stated repeatedly, creating and selling an eBook online is one of the most turnkey and passive methods to generate residual income online. I have been doing it for years, releasing a few eBooks each year, now totaling over 20 live and selling successfully online all on a passive and residual basis.
I also want to reiterate that if I can do it, there is no reason you can’t do it much better than I did. I am not technically savvy, nor is English my first language. It is my fourth! And before you eliminate the possibility of profiting from publishing an eBook because you don’t think you can write, read this article and throw that false belief out of the window right now.
I hope you found value in my experiences outlined in this series and are able to replicate the process to succeed online as well. I have done my best to provide practical and actionable guidance that you can immediately implement, and I loved every bit of compiling this series (my first one).
Please let me know if I missed any part of the process, or if there is anything else that you’d like more discussion or emphasis on. It is my hope that this series is the only resource you will ever need to publish and eBook and profit from it on a passive and residual basis with or without your own website or blog.
Bookmark this page and come back to it and let me know in the comments below if have any questions as you now embark on your own journey. I will be keeping an eye out for it and I’d be happy to help.
And just so that I know how I am doing, I’d love to hear your feedback on this series. Please help me shape up the direction of this blog going forward. Email me your thoughts at sunil {at} extramoneyblog {dot} com.
If you enjoyed this series, I’d also appreciate it if you Tweet it so others can find it and benefit from it. And if you haven’t yet, please come say hi to me on Facebook.
Wishing you all the best on your journey to profiting nicely from eBooks.