Your goal, once you get a new subscriber into your system is to keep them engaged and reading the content you’re sending. An email autoresponder is a great way to make that happen.
After all, when you use email marketing to engage potential customers, you get $44 back for every $1 you put in, on average. That’s a 4400% ROI.
The next question is, what should you send your new subscribers in your email autoresponder?
What Is An Email Autoresponder Anyway?
An email autoresponder is any automated sequence of emails you send to someone on your email list. Depending on your ESP or CRM, these may also be called campaigns or sequences.
The emails are usually sent 1-3 days apart and are typically informational. Many email autoresponders do ultimately end in a sales offer for a product or service related to the information they originally delivered.
Email autoresponders are triggered by an action, such as someone downloading your lead magnet or making a purchase.
Your email welcome sequence is a good example of an autoresponder. It’s a set of automated emails that go out as soon as someone opts into your email list to get your lead magnet. It delivers value to your new subscriber and ultimately offers a product, service, consultation or opportunity to sign up on a waitlist.
I do want to clarify here that there is a difference between a transactional email, which sends a receipt to the purchaser, and an email autoresponder. The transactional email is usually issued by your shopping cart or payment processor. The email autoresponder may be triggered by a purchase, but it’s not related directly to payment.
What’s the Difference Between an Email Autoresponder and an Email Nurture Sequence?
Honestly, you can use an autoresponder to deliver your email nurture sequence. Instead of going from your email welcome sequence straight into your new content, your new subscribers would get a longer sequence of automated emails.
There are plenty of companies that set up several months-worth of email autoresponder content to keep in touch with their new subscribers. This ensures that new subscribers are getting value delivered directly to their inboxes and those emails develop the trust and authority needed to convert them into customers.
It also means you don’t have to worry about what to write every day, few days, week, or whatever your email cadence may be.
Until you run out of emails in your sequence. At that point, you merge those new subscribers with your “regular” email list and send them the new content you write regularly.
How to Use an Email Autoresponder in Your Marketing
As I just mentioned, you can set up an email autoresponder to deliver your email nurture sequence. That’s a good place to start.
Other ways you can use an email autoresponder include:
- Deliver a mini-course as a lead magnet.
- Deliver an onboarding sequence to show a customer how to use your product or service after a purchase.
- Deliver content for a paid course.
- Send specific content to segments of your email list, based on their interests.
- Bring a potential customer back to a shopping cart with an abandon cart sequence.
The wonderful thing about an email autoresponder is, once it’s set up and running, you just need to check it once in a while to make sure everything is running smoothly. Otherwise, it can take care of itself.
I do recommend checking your open rates for each email in the sequence to see where people drop off. That may indicate that you need to test subject lines to make them more eye-catching and compelling. You may also need to change up the content, depending on what you’re delivering and your intent.
What Content Should You Send In Your Email Autoresponder?
That depends on what you’re trying to do.
If you’re sending a course, your content will be the course material.
If you’re onboarding a new customer, your content will be all about how to use your product or service and how your new customer can achieve their goals with that product or service.
Email autoresponders are a great place to recycle your current content. When I worked at Leadpages, we had an email autoresponder sequence that sent subscribers who hadn’t yet become customers to our most popular blog posts. Every time we added a new blog post that fit our criteria, a short email directing new subscribers to the post was added to the sequence.
This is also a good place to recycle the content emails you send as part of your regular email nurture sequence. As you write them, add them into the email autoresponder, so every new subscriber is seeing the same content.
If you have specific content geared toward certain products or services, you can segment subscribers who have expressed interest in those products or services and deliver that content to give them the information they need to make a purchase.
Selling as Part of Your Email Autoresponder
The goal of having an email list is to make sales, not deliver awesome content.
That being said, you do need to deliver awesome content to make that sale. That’s how you build the trust and authority needed to ask someone to buy your product or service.
If your intent is to make a sale as part of your email autoresponder, I recommend sending at least 3-5 emails to new subscribers before you do so. Each piece of content should deliver value and show your subscribers why your product or service is worth their time and money.
In your final email in that “series” you can make an offer.
Please note, you can have more than one “series” that makes an offer within your email autoresponder. If you have a long autoresponder sequence, you could make a few offers, depending on what you sell and how you segment your list.
As your sequence goes on, you can include a soft sell at the end of emails, as you see fit.
Email autoresponders should not always be sales emails. They’re designed to build trust and authority, so focus more on delivering great content to your subscribers than on selling.
How Do You Set Up an Email Autoresponder?
That depends on your ESP or CRM.
Your platform should have an option to use an email autoresponder. If it doesn’t, you should change to a different email marketing service, because this is a basic and necessary function of email marketing.
Your platform may limit the number of emails you can add to an email autoresponder, based on the level of service you have. Some free options don’t give you a lot of flexibility. This is a service worth paying for, so consider upgrading if this is a problem.
Your ESP or CRM should have a system that lets you preload all the emails in your email autoresponder and set a trigger that delivers them to a new subscriber or customer. It can be a bit time consuming, depending on how many emails you’re sending, but once it’s done, it takes a lot of work off your shoulders.
As I mentioned earlier, you can add new emails to your autoresponder over time, which can make the process easier.
Want to Learn More About How to Use Email Autoresponders in Your Email Marketing?
I cover how to write and automate autoresponders, sales emails, content emails and so much more inside the Email Marketing Connection Academy. This exclusive group supports business owners who use email marketing to nurture and convert subscribers into customers, so they can make their businesses grow and thrive.
I only open this group to new members a few times a year. Click on the button below to join the waitlist to find out when the Email Marketing Connection Academy opens its doors again.