This is Step #22 for 30 Days to Starting a Niche Business.  Each of the steps to creating a niche business will be documented in more detail. 

One of the most important aspects of running a successful niche business is automating as much of the sales and operations as you can to provide consistent delivery without reducing customer service.  One of the best ways to do that while a prospect is in the sales funnel is to automate an e-mail campaign.

The Difference Between Email Blasts and Autoresponders

A lot of websites have an e-mail capture form that the owner uses to send out an email blast, randomly or on a regularly scheduled basis (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly).  These email lists are good to have in order to keep in contact with people who have left the sales funnel or aren’t quite ready to be in the sales funnel, but they are not effective to attract new clients who are in the decision-making process.

For prospects, you need a laser-focused sales campaign, fine-tuned specifically for them.  Instead of communicating on a monthly basis, you need to be contacting them every few days for several weeks.  Since prospect become prospects at different times, you don’t want to send the same message to someone halfway through the sales cycle as you send to someone who just signed up.  Each one needs to be sent a message a specific time interval after they signed up.

Email Autoresponder Guidelines

Setting up an email autoresponder is not some great mystery and does not require some incredible sales writing skills.  You just need to write about what you know.  Here are some other guidelines:

• Never pepper the propsects with the message "Are you ready to buy?"  This is the worst thing that you can say in your e-mail and will only preclude them from signing up if they were on the fence. 
• Educate the prospects.  This is your opportunity to explain the benefits of your product and educate them on the choices available if they are looking to make a decision.
• All you are doing is staying on their short term memory.  That’s it!  Since half of your clients will sign up after their initial inquiry, if you didn’t stay in front of prospects, you would lose half of your new clients!
• Send a message every few days for a couple of weeks.  Don’t slam their e-mail inbox.  Just send them something short and interesting every few days for a couple of weeks.  After that, they can go in your email blast list in case something changes down the road for them.
• Use good tools.  Autoreponders are meant to do everything automatically.  Don’t try to manage everything manually or you will drive yourself nuts keeping up with who needs what email when.

Email Autoresponder Tools

There are tons of e-mail marketing programs available and a lot of them have some great features.  Unfortunately, most of them are built around e-mail newsletters and not automated messages per person.  Here are a few of the tools that we’ve used and would recommend to send messages to prospects based on when they become a lead.

• Aweber - A web based tool that gives you an unlimited amount of autoresponder lists.  There is nothing to intsall on your server - you just have to put some code on your web page where prospects sign up.  This program costs around $120 per year.
• SendStudio - A server based program for $279.  You have a bit more control and don’t have ongoing marketing costs compared to e-mail marketing services.

Sit down and write half a dozen e-mails that you might send manually to a new prospect.  These don’t have to (and shouldn’t) be long-winded.  Keep them simple and to the point.  The first one might be about introducing yourself and your product and you might have one in there about some limited special that you’re running.  Other than that, you can link to interesting articles, provide some helpful information, and that’s it.  Now take all these emails and put them in your email autoresponder and you are set to automatically attract new prospects.

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