Hi,
It’s late – almost 11. But I need to share this…
Two things actually, and I’ll get to the automation in a second.
I just spent about 2 hours chatting with Nancy Sabatini – a lady who knows wine as well as I know carpentry, and who has the passion to drive her own business.
Trust this – you’re going to be hearing a lot about Nancy in the next 12 months. I predict that she’ll make a partnership of some kind with Gary Vaynerchuck in the next 24 months and take the wine community by storm.
Just talking to her fired me up! And for anyone who knows me, I’m always excited about and by business. I thoroughly happy to be a writer, and Nancy got me really fired up by her passion.
Watch for her name – Nancy Sabatini.
Now to autmation…
A salesperson sent me an e-mail today and I have to say it was quite disappointing. And lest you think I’m pulling a Nick Usbourne, I wrote him a polite e-mail to express my disappointment. I also let him know his e-mail would be my content today, and that I would use neither his name nor the name of his company.
The worst thing is that he sent the e-mail from a “no-reply” address!
A salesperson – who says in his e-mail “Would you like to discuss?” – should never send from an e-mail address that clearly says “I don’t want a reply.”
Why am I going to answer when I can’t hit Reply?
Then he tells me that after a few minutes looking at my site, he has identified changes I should make.
I appreciate being bold – people tell me I’m quite bold. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell a prospect -whom you’ve never met before or developed a relationship with – that you know what their problems are and how to fix them.
Reading that didn’t make me feel well disposed toward this fellow.
So here’s the deal: Be careful with what you automate and how.
I agree completely with using an autoresponder to follow-up on prospects. Just make sure you send it from a legitimate address. Don’t use an address with “no reply” right in it.
In fact, services like Aweber don’t even allow those kinds of addresses.
When you send an autoresponder message, make sure you put useful, relevant content into the message.
You have an offer for a free report. Someone downloads that free report, you have their name and e-mail address added to a specific list in your e-mail manager. That list then gets an autoresponder series with content related specifically to the report they downloaded.
If you have 40 reports you use – do you have to have 40 unique autoresponder series? Not at all – you should definitely re-use all the content you can whenever you can. If you series has ten messages in it, there might only be one or two unique messages – or segments of messages – in each series.
For everyone who says “That’s too much work,” good. You’ll weed yourself out of the marketplace and make room for business owners who actually want to have a long-term, healthy relationship with their customers.
That’s my rant. Stop sending out crappy e-mails and start showing me you care enough about my business to actually give me useful, relevant information.
Sincerely,
Conrad Hall