337 – Extremely powerful Internet Marketing tool: Tom talks Autoresponders

Episode 337 - Autoresponders
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and thirty seven of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about the one of the most powerful things ever invented for Internet marketers, and that's the sequential autoresponder. Oh, my God. This has made me a fortune, which I usually tell you something on Mondays that has made me or saved me a fortune. And this one is at the top of the heap.

[00:00:53] Get to that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss Episode 336. Nicole Smith was a retired military veteran as part of Vetrepreneur's Month here at screw the commute. And she is a person who helps the military community by helping women who are burnt out from the military lifestyle to become just as committed to themselves as they are to their family and country. So check that out always. You can go to previous episodes by going screwthecommute.com slash the episode number and she was three thirty six. And how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well if the show has helped you out at all in your business or given your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit, screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talk in your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you and also put your website in there so you can get a big shout out in your own voice in front of thousands of people that listen to this show. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our automation ebook. This is allowed me to steal customers from other people because I can respond lightning fast to all the customer inquiries.

[00:02:12] And also it saved me millions of keystrokes. We actually figured it out seven and a half million keystrokes. That saved me just one of the tips in this book. So pick that up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And also we have a podcast app that make it easy for you to take us with you on the road. Go to screwthecommute.com/app. We have all kinds of training on how to use it, video and screen captures and all that stuff. All right. So everybody's freaking out because of the pandemic. But I'm not and my students aren't because they learn how to sell online. So I formalized this training many years ago in the form of a mentor program that was over twenty years ago. And then twelve years ago, I went through three years of scrutiny by the state of Virginia to get an actual licensed, dedicated school to this topic. No one else in the country has ever done this. No one else has gone through the scrutiny that I have to get that license. So that is at IMTCVA.org and it's a much better school than all these giant universities.

[00:03:29] They've been around a hundred years and all they're doing is indoctrinating students, teaching them how to protest, and then they get out with no skills that are marketable and competing for jobs at Starbucks. Well, I thought that is just crapola and I don't want anything to do with that, although I'm in favor of higher education, but something that actually helps you have a career. Now, the things we teach are in high demand. Everywhere you go. You'd have to really be pitiful to not be able to get a job when everybody on Earth, every business that exists, needs websites and shopping carts and email marketing and text marketing and chat bots and all these things we teach you. And in six months you can graduate. Usually people take six months to a year if they're doing it part time and have these skills that are in high demand and we have people making money before they even graduate because these skills are in such demand. So check that out at IMTCVA.org and I'm also going to tell you a little later how you can get a full scholarship that you can use yourself for gift to a loved one.

[00:04:45] And you couldn't do him any better favor than to give them, give him this because and save them for years of wasted life weather and then they come home and live with you. So check that out at IMTCVA.org.

[00:04:59] Let's get to the main event. Autoresponders, and in particular sequential autoresponders, which means you can send out message after message after message automatically. So here's a little bit of history. We used to have auto responders as far back as I can actually remember on the Web, and I started in nineteen ninety four. OK, so the first ones I think were the out of office reply, which people still use today when when they're not there to pick up their email. Now the first ones I used would deliver one message and to really date myself they were similar to the old fax on demand. If anybody even remembers that, where someone could dial a certain fax number and get a certain piece of information and people would come back to their fax machine and people would advertise, let's say, call and a certain number and get the prices for a Cancun trip fax to you. That's how it kind of work. Now, the other responses we had would just deliver one message. You would email a certain email address depending on what information you wanted. I remember I would have have the ad rates to advertise in great speaking easy or in autoresponder, I would put the email address in my newsletter so people that wanted to advertise could get the rates immediately back via email.

[00:06:33] Then came the sequential autoresponder, oh, boy, I'm pretty sure it was available around two thousand or two thousand one. This was a game changer and I really mean game changer. If you ask people that have been around as long as I have and there's not that many. What were some of the most powerful tools invented for Internet marketing, the sequential autoresponder would be at the top of the list. Sequential means that not only does it send the first email message, it sends as many follow up messages as you want to send out and buy as many days as you want in between them. This change, the Internet marketing world and I'm certain has been responsible for many trillions and yes, I mean trillions of dollars in sales for millions of marketers, sequential order sponsors are one of the most powerful sales tools still today. They send out follow up emails to customers and prospects to keep your sales message going out automatically mean this service is virtually never seen integrated with basic shopping cart systems that I rail against.

[00:07:58] You usually have to contract out with a separate company and somehow get the shopping cart and autoresponder company to work together. Oh my God, I spent a fortune on that in the early days, never did work. And each company would blame the other one. Why it didn't work. I mean, I'm talking I spent three or four thousand bucks to try to get it to work. It would work.

[00:08:21] So only the most advanced shopping carts would have this function integrated.

[00:08:26] I'm going to tell you the one we use. It's not expensive, but it's highly advanced to do all this stuff in one place for you. Now, before I get too deep into what Autoresponder can do, let me make sure you understand the distinction between an autoresponder email and a broadcast email.

[00:08:47] Autoresponder, email is always, always triggered by someone else.

[00:08:56] Just like the facts on demand, someone had to do something to trigger that return facts now in the Internet marketing world, there are two common events that trigger autoresponder. One is when someone buys something and the other is when they opt in for a freebie or incentive that you've given them to get their email address. You rarely see people emailing anymore to trigger an autoresponder, a broadcast email, as opposed to an autoresponder, a broadcast email is an email sent to people on your list. Any time you feel like it, you decide when you want to send what you can even schedule them to go out on their own. If you're not going to be around to send the broadcast at a particular time that you wanted it to go out, but you are in charge of triggering that. So an autoresponder is triggered by someone else and a broadcast is sent. Any time you want to youdecide and autoresponder, I'll tell you can handle, you know, infinitely more emails than you could ever process manually. And also you can send a 10 page email just as fast and easily as sending a two paragraph email.

[00:10:16] But I got to tell you, in today's atmosphere, shorter emails are better driving people to your Web site. That has a lot of advantages because the longer the email, the more chance it has to get caught in a spam filter and then the more website visits and time on site makes you look better to the search engines. So and you can promote all your stuff and the, you know, show them all of your products and services and everything while they're at your website where you couldn't jam all that stuff into one email.

[00:10:49] Anyway, Autoresponder, there are ways you can automate your promotions and keep them selling for you while you're doing something else. You won't be sitting in front of the computer all day long. The great way to get the information out to your market. Now, I've had some of my sequences of emails going out for more than 15 years with no changes. And at last check I had about four hundred and seventy different sequences or campaigns. We call them serving my customers while I'm recording this for you. That's pretty powerful, don't you think? Anyway, your messages are going to last a long time. So when writing the messages, try to write them in such a way that you don't have to change them too often. But if you do this, the response is going to work quietly behind the scenes with little or no attention. If it's something that's some real current thing, make sure you go in and change it after the currency has gone so that it doesn't look old when somebody gets it. I mean, these things work so quietly behind the scenes, it's easy to forget about certain sequences that you have going or campaigns and and and you could be sending that old information. In fact, there's a story in one of my students. Oh, it was really terrible. This this is then you got to why I'm laughing now. But it wasn't funny at all. He got a lot of backlash to this. So he was talking about how getting a flood of customers, which went out, I think it was right after Hurricane Katrina that flooded the, you know, the whole Louisiana basin and all that stuff.

[00:12:33] And so he got a lot of backlash to that. But that was written I mean, maybe a couple of years before the event.

[00:12:42] So just check up on them once in a while so that stuff doesn't happen to you. So little terminology. A campaign I called a sequencer campaign is what most people call him is a bunch of emails going to a person who triggered the autoresponder. Each campaign could have a number of follow up emails that you want to send.

[00:13:06] These emails can be separated by any number of days that you want, and the number of days don't need to be the same between each email. I mean, you could send one a day for the first three days and then one a week after that. I mean, you can set it up however you want. I have different campaigns for each product. Someone buys and I have different campaigns if they want public speaking tips or Internet marketing tips, you don't want to mix stuff.

[00:13:36] I've had all kinds of other side hustles for golf, protection dogs and various other topics, but they all had their own campaign, so people were only hearing what they're interested in. If you don't do that and you just lump everybody together, though, unsubscribe, you'll never sell anything that way.

[00:13:56] Now, there's another term you need to know about. It's called unsubscribe upon subscribe.

[00:14:04] This means when someone subscribes to a new autoresponder campaign, they stop getting a previous campaign. So let's say you had an autoresponder campaign to try to get someone to purchase a particular product. And let's also say that it had seven emails in the campaign.

[00:14:24] And one other thing we'll say is that on email five, the person bought the product. Well, it wouldn't make much sense to keep sending them emails six and seven, since they already bought the product from email five say so you can set things.

[00:14:44] So after they bought the product, the autoresponder can put them in a new email campaign about the product they just bought and unsubscribe them from the campaign that was trying to get them to buy. Go back and listen to that if you need to, but it's really powerful so that you keep people in autoresponder campaigns, but you're not sending them stuff that doesn't make sense. All right. So what else can you do with Autoresponder? Well, they can be used to train the customer in the use of your product and or suggest other products that would likely be of interest. The best part is, is that after it's set up, the entire process goes on autopilot, totally unattended, which saves you time and money. It also makes you money because a recent survey by ZDNet found that 98 percent of customers would repurchase from a company, that they had a good you know, they had a good product from and they purchased from them. If they were just ask, OK, if they were you just ask them to buy something else. They 98 percent would and other responders make sure they get ask when you're too busy to do it yourself. Another big benefit of responder's is that they tend to decrease returns, especially on big ticket products, because buyer's remorse can really increase your return rate. So a simple automated series of follow up emails will let the customer know you aren't going to disappear now that you have their money.

[00:16:25] It can also reassure them they made a wise decision in purchasing your product.

[00:16:32] Now, sequential order responders have made me a load of money, I mean, literally millions of dollars by delivering Ecourses for me, both paid and free.

[00:16:44] Now, listen to this. My first free Ecourse brought me in seven thousand dollars the first week. How can I do that? Well, I gave the people the free information that they were promised in the Ecourse one per day for seven days. But each part of each e-mail that went out at the bottom said something like, hey, if you're really serious about this topic, I got this multimedia thing for you for one hundred ninety nine dollars. I don't think I put one hundred ninety nine in the email. Let him go to the sales letter. So they got all the free stuff I promised them, but they got offered a little thing to go by if they wanted. And they did. Lots of them did for seven thousand bucks just in the first week. So that is a very powerful. Now if you have the shopping cart system that we promote kickstartcart.com, which I personally have used for 19 years now, OK, you can have unlimited sequential autoresponder campaigns now. I covered shopping cart systems in episode 10, so screwthecommute.com/10. And the reason I'm using Kickstartcart is because it is totally integrated with my shopping system and the autoresponder can be tied to a specific purchase, which is extremely powerful sales and customer service technique.

[00:18:07] Now, the way it works is that when someone buys a product, they automatically subscribe themselves to follow up emails. And the emails can be used to give additional tips on how to use what they bought or to sell them more products. Now, I personally, I try to give several service emails before I try to sell something else, because I want people to get used to getting emails from me that aren't always hounding them to buy something. Anyway, I talk about that in my list, a new list building block I'll tell you about in a minute. Now, the customer can unsubscribe themselves any time if they don't feel your emails are of value. So that's another reason you want to make sure that they're helpful emails every single time. Now, here's another cool thing about Kickstartcart. In a good autoresponder system, you can choose whatever return email address you want so I can put Tom@screwthecommute.com if it's, you know, podcast related, I can put Tom@ProtectionDogsElite.com of my protection dog company. I can put Tom@IMTCVA.org if it's from my school and orders@Antion.com for everything else. So you can customize it and the more you customize things and make sure everything lines up psychologically to people.

[00:19:30] I mean, it would be crazy if somebody asks something about protection dogs and they got an email from Screw the commute, you know, it just doesn't line up. They start to wonder, what is this, just the jack of all trades? Well, I don't want to say that I am, but after all the years I've been in business, I've done a lot of things. But I don't want people to look at me like that is like, oh, man, he can't be a protection dog guy if he's an Internet guy and and he can't be a podcast guy if he's a dog guy. I mean sisso so you want things to line up psychologically. Now don't forget to let people know that you have a strict privacy policy so they don't feel you're going to spam them to death. With too many promotional emails, you can have a little privacy policy link on your opt in forms. And just a reminder that your email list is where the money is. Everyone at my level makes the bulk of their money on email.

[00:20:25] No, nobody that's been around it really disputes that. So it's really important that you build your email list. And I've got a brand new 100 page ebook called The Ultimate Guide to List Building that teaches you how to set up your infrastructure to be able to to get them to sign up and also what to do to keep them to sign up, keep them signed up so they don't unsubscribe. And also, twenty two ways to get traffic to your squeeze pages and other sign up forms so you can find it at screwthecommute.com/listbuilding. And I got a coupon code for you to save your ten bucks off the this brand new book. So it's listbuild901. All this will be in the show notes. All right. If you want training on all this stuff, many of you know I have the longest running, most successful ever and most unique mentor program. It's been running for over twenty years.

[00:21:22] Seventeen hundred students, no lawsuits, no refunds, no people charging back their credit card because I'm a schmuck. No, I just take care of people. And nobody else on this earth has the value that this program has. I triple dog dare you to find somebody. And let's compare programs.

[00:21:44] It's unique in several ways. One is you get an immersion visit where you actually live in this estate. I have called the great Internet Marketing Retreat Center. You get to shoot video in my TV studio where we we had one mentee shoot fifty three videos.

[00:22:04] Another guy shot forty seven. Any one of them would cost you seven hundred bucks or more at a professional studio. We just include that. And while my guy edits them for you, give them to you. You can use them for all kinds of YouTube and promotional stuff and sales videos, everything you want. That's just, that's just one of the things included in this. Then the probably the most unique thing is that it's all one on one. You're not lumped in with a group of people, which a lot of these scammers that don't have one fiftieth of the knowledge I have will throw you in a big group so that the time gets eaten up without them being forced to to teach you much and if they are talking to an advanced person. You're lost if you're not if you're a beginner, if you're a beginner, the advanced people are wondering, why did I pay for this on board? So ours is one on one with me and my entire staff that I have trained. So we'll take over your screen if necessary to you. Click here, click here. Don't click here. Here's how to do this. I critique your sales letters, your sales process. I mean, everything involved in this is one on one except for your retreat center visit, which is maybe five people say so it's still pretty much one on one. So anyway, that's greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and another unique feature that made all the gurus mad is that they were charging 50 or 100 grand to teach you this stuff up front. And I said that's a you know, there most of them are rip offs and the ones that aren't rip offs.

[00:23:39] Still, that's too risky for a small business. So I said I'm just going to have them pay an entry fee and then I get a percentage of profits that's capped so they're not stuck with me forever. So for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to make 200000 net. And so people love this. And seventeen hundred students later, it's still going strong. So so check that out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and give me a call. Plus if you're in the mentor program, you get a scholarship to the school, which you can gift to someone or use yourself for just extra structured training so nobody can nobody can put up stuff like I do. OK, so these auto responders are really, really powerful. You got to do this and get these installed in your business.

[00:24:32] Kickstartcart is the way to go. We also, even if you're not in my mentor program, we give free training on that. I'm representative for that. And we've used it for 19 years personally. So it's the way to go.

[00:24:45] All right. So we'll catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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