In continuing with our series on effective autoresponders let’s talk about how to automate your email marketing. It starts with a few good ideas.

Email Marketing Ideas

You probably know that email is a tremendous asset for any online business or any company today. It’s a direct way to reach consumers, and it boasts a huge ROI (return on investment).

Your list is an asset that you wholly own and control, instead of being at the mercy of Facebook, Twitter, or some other corporation. In short, email is something you must pay attention to.

The only problem is, paying attention takes time, energy, and resources. That can be a challenge if you’re flying solo as a small business owner, but there is good news. There are ways to automate and make your email marketing simpler.

Automate Your Email Marketing Here Are A Few Ideas

Topic Research

The first stumbling block many writers hit is figuring what to write. If you don’t have the plans it’s hard to progress in any meaningful way.

To help you with this, have an assistant or writer to generate a list of monthly programs. Give them a general subject area and have them search for hot topics, products you might promote, and new angles to explore.

Writing Done for You

Contract with a writer to expand on the topic ideas. Ask them to deliver a month, or more, of email content, so you can make a comprehensive email marketing campaign.

The plan so you can have the writer add relevant links and a call to action into each email message.

Automated Delivery

Use an autoresponder service to manage your email list, and to schedule and deliver messages. Pre-load a series of letters, so all new subscribers automatically receive all the words you loaded, according to the schedule you set out.

It means that when Subscriber A signs up on Tuesday, they will get Email 1 on the first day, Email 2 at the interval you specify, and so on.

Then when Subscriber B signs up on Friday, they will also get Email 1, Email 2, and the rest of the series, again, according to the schedule you create.

If you have ever done direct mail in the old days you will immediately recognize the benefits of using an autoresponder. For the low cost of less then $20 a month you can reach your list anytime you want 24 hours a day with the push of a button.

Using an autoresponder series has some benefits, including:

• Every subscriber will get every message you send out. When you merely broadcast a newsletter every week, many of the great words you previously sent out will be missed by new subscribers as they come on.

• You have full control over the message your subscriber receives throughout the series, which can help your conversions tremendously. You can start by providing information on a topic, introducing a product to help them, and then following up to get them to buy.

Each subscriber will receive that full series of messages, and then you can continue to progress to topics and promotions that will help your subscribers even further.

Of course, you do have to be careful to ensure your autoresponder series includes evergreen topics, and you should check it regularly to ensure that links and information are up to date.

Loading Your Autoresponder

Here’s where to put your virtual assistant to work. There are many things your assistant can do to help you keep your email marketing hands-free, including:

– Proofreading messages and checking links.
– You are adding your affiliate and product links.
– Formatting email for HTML, if needed.
– Loading and scheduling messages.
– Checking stats and providing you with a report summary.
– Reviewing autoresponder series regularly to ensure they’re up to date.

The more you can automate your email marketing, the more you can focus on improving your results, developing products, and growing your business.

If you enjoyed today’s article, “Automate Your Email Marketing.” If these tools helped you in any way, please share the tools with others.

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Please leave your questions and comments below. I would love to get your feedback!

Elizabeth

Frequently Asked Questions: Automate Your Email Marketing

What is email and marketing automation?

This is where you move away from manually sending emails out for marketing purposes to automating the process. Marketing has a sales aspect attached to it.

Your emails are meant to move your business in one way or another. Often you are promoting a product, post, or page to your email list.

What is an email automation?

Think of using an autoresponder to automatically send email. In my opinion this is the single best invention to Internet has come up with in the last 20 years.

I know Internet marketers who have a series of email messages set up in their autoresponder to go out for several years in advance. When you do email marketing this way you can focus 100% on building your list and letting your autoresponder take over once you have a new subscriber.

Is an automated message from a mail system?

Yes it is. It is actually sent out using software. Most of us use an autoresponder company such as Aweber of Mail Chimp. Some have their own sofware system they use.

How do I automate MailChimp emails?

Join MailChimp for free here. Their system lets you set up email messages to be sent automatically when someone joins your list and at times you pre set in the future.

Mail Chimp provides great training to help you automate your email messages. They call this MailChimp 101.

If you have an existing list you can import it into MailChimp. You can also set up multiple campaigns which can be helpful when you segmenting your email list for various reasons.