How to use an autoresponder

Have you heard about an autoresponder yet? An autoresponder can be a very powerful tool and today I will show you what it is and how you can use it to earn money on autopilot.

What is an autoresponder

Let’s say you have a website and you added a sign-up form to collect email addresses from your users. Every time a user enters his email address and presses on sign-in you collect a so-called lead. And to every lead, you can send emails.

To build a relationship with your users it is a good idea to welcome them and to tell them something about yourself. For that, an autoresponder can be used. The autoresponder sends one or more emails to your leads after you collected their email address.

This can be for example a welcoming email the day the user signed.

How can you use an autoresponder

As I already mentioned you can use the autoresponder to send a welcome email. You can also use it to send further follow-up emails. For example, if you have a sign-in form that promises the user a free email course (like the one on the right) you can send them the parts of the courses by email with an autoresponder.

Later on, you can inform your leads about new blog posts or about new products you found. The better the relationship between you and your email lead the higher your conversions. If you have users that trust you very much it is very likely that they will buy one of your products.

Let’s say you have a blog about fitness. So the first welcome mail can be for example about motivation. 3 days later you can send them an email with diet tips. 5 days later they get an email about a workout or something like that.

How can you earn money with an autoresponder

You can also use it to promote your products. Let’s take again the example of the fitness blog. The third mail, for example, can be a promotion about your training system. This is very powerful because your customer already has a relationship with you so they are more willing to open your mail and try your product.

And while they are reading your mail you don’t have to do anything! These emails will be sent on autopilot so you can sell your products while relaxing on the beach or drinking beer 🙂

It really depends on your user base and the context but in email marketing, you say that one lead is worth about $1 per month. That means if you have 1,000 leads you can make about $1,000 per month. Of course, not everyone in your list is buying your product.

But if you have for example a cheap product for $10 it is very likely that more people will buy it. If 10% of you list buys your product you earn up to $1,000: 1.000 leads x 10% x 10$ = 1,000$.

If you have a more expensive product fewer people will buy it but you have more profit per sold unit. As you can see on average you can make about $1 per lead.

Think about how much money you can make with 10,000 leads!

How much does an autoresponder cost

There are some email marketing tools that are free but I can’t recommend all of them. The problem is that in the beginning, it may be great because they are for free but when your user base grows the price also grows and then they are usually more expensive than other tools.

I have used two different autoresponder tools I can recommend. The first one is AWeber. It has a clean and simple interface and has all the features you need, to begin with. You can test AWeber for free for 30 days and later it starts at $19 for 500 users.

The other email marketing tool I can recommend is GetResponse. It has also a 30 days trial period and in addition some marketing tools like webinars or landing pages. It starts at $15 for 1.000 users.

I started email marketing with AWeber and I was totally happy with it and I use GetResponse on this website and I’m also totally happy with it. I don’t think you can do anything wrong here!

When it comes to email marketing I often hear: “But that’s $15 per month!”. Yes, that is true but email marketing is a very good investment. If you have a solid user base you don’t need to work much on your website anymore because you can earn good money with your user base.

So yes, in the beginning, it can be costly but the return on invest can be very high so use the chance! Have you used an autoresponder or email marketing yet? Do you know other tools you can recommend? I would love to hear from you so please leave a comment below 🙂