5 Tips on Supporting Your Sales Staff

Re: 5 Tips on Supporting Your Sales Staff

Autoresponders have long been a staple of entrepreneurial content marketers, but hardly anyone in the mainstream has done much autoresponder testing yet. After running a few tests myself, and chatting with a bunch of people who've tested them, I've come up with a few guidelines for success:

1. Day & hour timing -- Just as with regular email campaigns, the time of day sent and day of week sent can make a big difference in response rates.

Unfortunately most autoresponder ASPs don't let you control timing beyond the number of days between each send. A responder that can skip weekends on demand, and only send during designated hours (either a preset time-of-day you determine, or at the hour that the original start request came in) is probably going to do better for you.

2. Staggering timing -- Most marketers begin testing either a single message per day for a set number of days, or a message per week for a set number of weeks. However, just like good renewal series, staggered timing may work even better with messages building to a crescendo of urgency around a particular event (such as a discount expiration date).

3. Supporting renewals early on -- I've heard of and personally witnessed many test results in B2B and B2C publishing where special attention during the first 30 days of subscriptions made a profound difference to renewal rates months later.

Makes sense -- your new subscribers pay extra attention to your content and open email at a higher rate during the first 30-60 days, so it's a great time to make a good impression for a longer lifetime account value. (It's a lot harder to get them to love you again once that thrill of being a new subscriber has worn
off.)

4. Cross-selling other products -- if someone's bought PDF 'X' in your online store, you can use an autoresponder discount coupon to market related product 'Y' to them a week or so later.

5. Change your offers. If you're doing an autoresponder series that goes for 5-7 days (such as a free ecourse to support sales of a book more substantially than a single sample chapter download would) it's awfully tempting to paste in the same offer at the end of each message.

Re: 5 Tips on Supporting Your Sales Staff

It is a good post.Thanks for sharing this ideas.