Marketers love blogging. It’s great when you attract an audience, build authority, gain trust, and work your way up towards the top of the search engine rankings.
But writing a blog takes time, effort and to be successful, it also needs to be supported by other forms of marketing. It needs a mate.
So before you even start your first blog, you may want to learn about a blogs best friend, the email autoresponder, which is simply a series of email marketing messages automatically sent out to subscribers in an order and regularity that you determine in advance.
An autoresponder typically delivers a tutorial or sequence of messages to customers that could be swayed into buying your product or using your service. It builds a platform in readiness for a potential sale by nurturing prospects in the reassuring comfort of their own space and a time convenient to them.
And whether your subscriber is the first or the 10,000th, it will create the same great experience.
Which is only one of its’ benefits.
An autoresponder doesn’t shut down when you are sleeping, it does not care that it’s a Bank Holiday or Christmas break. It does not get bored with that same old marketing message and it never ever gets irritated – it just delivers your best content, in good order, with the right frequency, to every new reader who finds you.
It’s a real team player.
The best friend a Marketer could have
It might be that you want to take a break every now and again, perhaps head off on holiday or take a city break somewhere – you need not worry - your autoresponder is always there working its socks off in the background, taking care of business.
What does a good autoresponder look like?
Not all autoresponders are all they are cracked up to be, some are all about the marketer, which as we know is, of course, wrong!
An autoresponder should be about the user.
Its main function is to take a curious bystander and turn them into a fanatical advocate of whatever it is that you do.
To accomplish that, it needs your best input, the type of content that makes your fans happy every time they see it. You need to add value, inspire, excite.
You don’t need to be Stephen Fry or Shakespeare!
It does though need to be useful!
The content delivered needs to solve your readers’ problems, ideally without costing you anything. And, if it shows your trustworthiness and likeability in the process, more’s the better!
Well thought out autoresponders help you make a case for people to do business with you, by educating them on why you are so great, before they commit to buy.
It will let help them examine the problem they are facing and how to overcome that by building trust in you, by outlining its core features and benefits whilst painting a picture of what life is going to be like once the problem is solved.
And in most cases, solving the problem includes purchasing your product or service. Funny that.
Gone but not forgotten
So, did they buy or call? If not, and they aren’t quite ready, they will at least be keeping warm with your email content until they are.
This could be months or even years – but as long as you keep delivering on your promise of interesting relevant content, you can automagically keep them engaged on the back burner until the time is right.
If you build it, they will come
There is no such thing as free traffic. You have to pay for traffic in some way, either through advertising on something like Pay Per Click or with your own time and creativity using a blog.
Yes, the reality of blogging is that it will take a toll on your time and effort (unless 😉 someone else does it for you) so you need to capture every fan from the very start.
There’s no point intentionally missing leads right?
This is why building your autoresponder first is recommended by professionals like us, and certainly do this before you even begin Social Media Marketing and the like. Otherwise it is like fishing without a net.
And to those of you who are reading this and already have a blog without an autoresponder in place. Don’t delay, build your autoresponder today!
