The following excerpt is from Robert W. Bly’s book The Digital Marketing Handbook. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
Whenever one of your prospects or customers clicks on a link and makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or membership in your program, or even when first subscribing to receive your email, there should always be a response sent via autoresponder from you to show your appreciation for their efforts.
Simply put, an autoresponder is software or SaaS (software as a service) that sends a sequence of emails to a person who has taken some action. You write the emails, enter them into the autoresponder system, set the action that triggers the sending of the autoresponder email series, and also schedule when each effort goes out.
Following are the three types of autoresponder campaigns you might want to consider setting up:
Sequence emails
Don’t presume that just because readers bought your ebook that this is all they want to know about. For instance, if your ebook was about canning fruit, you could do a sequence of emails, with one on the best types of cookware to do canning with, the next email on types of natural pesticides to use on your fruit in the garden before picking them for canning, a third email on how to optimize soil mixtures for best fruit production, and so on.
You could set up a whole automated sequence email campaign on just that leading to a landing page for your new book that incorporates all that information — and more. You can call it, “The Complete Guide to Growing and Canning Your Fruit.” The goal with sequence emails is to keep customers interested in the information you have to share – and the products you have to sell.
Lead-nurturing (drip) autoresponder emails
People who sign up for your emails probably fit into several groups: those who are ready to buy something from you, those who are thinking about it but want more information, and those who are interested in being on your list but don’t know if they want to buy anything right now.
For these readers, sending out automated emails on interesting subjects related to your products and services is the most important part of keeping readers engaged with your brand and learning more about what you offer.
Here’s how a drip email campaign would work: Let’s say you had a recent campaign to capture more leads by offering a free white paper that discussed one of the components of the new service you’re offering.
Once you’re captured these leads, send this new group a…
