Websites & Autoresponders

Within the world of internet marketing you cannot promote any product or service online unless you have people to promote to. This is a fairly obvious statement. Having a signup form on your main website is essential or visitors to your site will simply arrive, look around and move on without leaving any trace of their visit. You will never know who these people were and, therefore, it will not be possible to follow up and persuade them to revisit.

Most new visitors will arrive on your website more-or-less by chance. It will be pure accident in many case as people surf the internet, following links from other sites until suddenly, “bingo”, they find themselves on your homepage. Most will have no intention of making a purchase and the vast majority will leave without taking up any of the offers that you may have available. It is well documented that it takes several visits to your website before potential customers will finally buy; – as many as seven visits has been mooted.

The first and obvious issue here is that visitors must enjoy your website. They must like the look of it, appreciate the content, enjoy exploring it and feel comfortable looking around. If they find themselves faced with a heavy sales pitch and nothing else, they are very likely to move on within a few seconds of arriving. Your website needs to make them want to stay and look around. Blog posts and articles will divert them and links to interesting videos, etc. will help to keep them around for a while. So, when traffic does arrive give it some nice roads to drive on!

Having made that initial impact, what happens next? If we can persuade them to leave their ‘calling card’, their name and email address, we can then follow up and begin to build a relationship. This is where the signup form mentioned in my first paragraph comes into the equation. It is usual to offer an incentive to your visitors by offering FREE resources of one kind or another (articles, ebooks, even downloadable audio or video files) in order to encourage them to add their name and email to the signup form. Do ensure that even the free items you offer are of a good quality and of value to your subscribers. If they sign up and then receive a two page, shoddily presented and badly written article on a tenuously related topic, they will be searching immediately for the unsubscribe link. In online business quality really matters, whether you are dealing with a free offer, a front-end product or a back-end product, never short-change your customers; it will backfire on you for certain.

This is where the online marketer’s friend comes into its own; that is the Autoresponder. Once a visitor has subscribed to your list you can then programme the autoresponder to send out messages at intervals to keep the subscribers interested and to encourage them back to your website where, hopefully, they will ultimately purchase products or services to be found there. An autoresponder can also issue newsletters as well as broadcast new offers to the whole of your list simultaneously.

The message therefore is create, or have created, an attractive and interesting website where you can encourage visitors to sign up to your list, usually by way of a free offer. The autoresponder then takes over, building a relationship with your subscribers through regular value emails and through which new products or services can be promoted as they become available. This whole aspect of your business will then be running on automatic pilot.