As of next week I should be a dad again, so my hands are going to be full and life is going to be hectic and I will think of sleep and a social life with a nostalgic, whistful sigh…

Anyway, the reason I am telling you this (other than the obvious fact I am excited) is that I am going to have my hands full, so please forgive me in advance if the next few weeks and months go a bit off-schedule.  In fact I am putting the Tuesday Topup weekly blog post article on hold because baby, wife and family are going to pull rank.

Everything else here at HQ will carry on like clockwork without me.  If you have any affiliate questions, please, make sure you exhaustively read everything here at www.2uaffiliates.com and for all product related questions you will find the answers onsite at www.2u.co.uk.  If you have any customer related queries please use the FAQ and contact system at www.product-help.info  

So I shall sign off now and speak with you again in the not too distant future.

Contact Management is the art and science of contacting your visitors and customers, in the most appropriate way, repeatedly, with the aim of helping them, delivering service to them and encouraging them to become a customer and a repeat customer.

So how do you do this?

There are more advanced ways, but the quickest, simplest and easiest is with Aweber’s email system.

In this edition let’s look at using “Sequential Autoresponders”.

I am going to show you inside a current LIVE email campaign with us on 2u.co.uk - but first…

Sequential autoresponders - break the words down into their parts.  It is an automatic responding email system that sends the emails out to the subscribers in a set sequence.

For example, the email sequence might be as follows:

Email 1 - Instant on sign up

Email 2 - Day 2

Email 3 - Day 5

Email 4 - Day 10

… or however you want to set it.

Think about how important this is …

You can send out the “thank you for subscribing/buying” email instantly, followed by “I hope it is to your satisfaction” email, followed by “You bought X, now you might want to consider Z” etc.

Now I am going to show you how easy this is to set up in Aweber - and show you in one of our LIVE email campaigns.

Click the ‘Play’ triangle to watch how …

If you cannot see the video above then click here now

For the FREE TEST DRIVE go to Aweber

Last week I showed you the lead-up to email marketing and the best email system to use.

Now let’s dig a little deeper on just this one angle of getting your emails through to your subscribers…

So-called ‘intelligent’ anti-spam filters block email by

1. Its content AND
2. Where the email is sent FROM.

The biggest sinners in this are unfortunately the major email providers - in approximate order of effect …

1. AOL
2. Yahoo
3. Hotmail
4. and the other major providers

From experience, we have found AOL to be the biggest blocker of legitimate email.

Your email gets blocked BEFORE it even gets to the person’s junk filter box. That means that even if you were to speak with the person and ask them to check their junk email box, they would not find it, because …

It is NOT there!

Why?
The recipient’s email provider has filtered the email and blocked it. It is deleted and blocked.

If your email comes from an unrecognised or unknown server, the major email providers effectively flag your email as maybe spam. Then the slightest questionable content, and your email is deleted faster than you can say “legitimate email”.

That means that if you are sending email from your own server, from your own website, chances are that a lot of it is getting blocked in this way.

So what can you do about it
You need to send your email only from a server that is approved by the major email providers.

This is called ‘whitelisting’.

It is like a VIP guest list…”If you’re not on the whitelist, your email’s not coming in!”If your email is coming from a whitelisted server, you have a VIP pass.How do you get on the list? How do you get whitelisted?

You have 2 options:

1. Get your own server whitelisted
2. Send your email from someone else’s server that is whitelisted.

We analysed the first option - getting your own server whitelisted. It is not cheap. One of the main providers that enable you to get white listed charge approximately £25,000 to get set up - then £15,000 each year.

Obviously this is a little higher than most people’s budget!

There is another possible answer to getting your own servers whitelist, but we have not yet tested it so cannot recommend it to you one way or the other. It is still much more expensive that using third-party senders (see below) but is less that £25k+. With suretymail.com expect to pay around £200 a month.

So how about the second option - sending your email from someone else’s server that is whitelisted?

This is the option we currently use. And we STRONGLY recommend you use the same provider we use - Aweber.

Their servers are whitelisted so their deliverability rates are the highest in the market.

That means your email will get through.The cost is a less than a meal out - click here now to get your email DELIVERED.

There are many, many other benefits to using Aweber which add up to them being the best in the world, bar none.

Yes, there are 1 or 2 others that are equal like Email Aces, but none better.

And Aweber’s system is incredibly easy to use.

You can take a FREE test drive of the Aweber Email system here

Click here to learn more

Last week we looked at the vital importance of understanding the relationship between value and money. 

In short you’ve got to - got to - got to - give massive value before you can expect any money in return.  And the value is whatever the value is to the customer. 

Moving forward from there - a question … 

“How do you funnel customers to your product or service - and get them to come back again and again?” 

There are 3 key elements: 

1. Contact,
2. Contact Management, and
3. Giving value (as discussed last week) 

“Contact” refers to the initial contact.  The first thing the customer sees of you and how they got there.  This is discussed elsewhere under the broad headings of “traffic generation” and everything that gets the visitor ultimately TO your website. 

“Contact Management” is how you then ‘talk’ with your visitors, both at the time of the initial contact and every point thereafter.  Built into this is your overall ‘brand’ - ie the overall feel of the customer’s experience with you. 

I am going to go in more detail into the “Contact” part and the rest of “Contact Management” and talking with your visitor at a later point, but for now, lets look just at the methods for talking with them again. 

Specifically, you need to talk with your customer right now, and again afterwards, until you have given so much value to them that they are ready to buy, to give you money for what you are offering. 

It is a generally accepted marketing truism that on average customers need at least 7 points of contact - 7 repeated conversations with you or your company or your product or service - before they will buy. 

Over time you will build up a growing list or database of potential customers, who have not yet bought from you. 

If you don’t contact them again you are leaving a whole lot of money on the table - and you could genuinely be able to help them, and they will go without … 

Unless you contact them again a number of times. 

You need to be contacting them with valuable, helpful information that helps show them you are worth doing business with. 

And you need to talk with someone who first came to you yesterday differently to someone who first came to you 1 month ago or 6 months ago. 

So as the number of people who have visited your site or business grows,  how do you do this without working a 25 hour day? 

Email Marketing using Sequential Autoresponders: 

Now I will say this up front - Email marketing does not work as well as it used to.  But is that a reason to not use it? 

I have heard people say “There’s no point to doing email marketing because it doesn’t work as well as it used to” 

It’s possibly the dumbest answer I have ever heard. 

Just because something used to work better, is no logical reason to stop using it.  The only time to stop using something is when the returns are less than the time, effort and cost of using it. 

So back to email marketing… 

You need to contact your visitors again and again with useful, insightful, helpful information that shows you are an expert. 

Firstly you need to CAPTURE their contact details.   

If you don’t capture their details and if they don’t buy on that first contact - which in all probability they will not - then you have wasted all your traffic-getting efforts. 

The bare minimum thing to capture is their email address and a very close second is their first name.  You can ask for more, but with every field (piece of information) you ask you will get less and less people who actually respond. 

So you need to take and store their email and first name. 

Then you need to email them instantly to welcome them and thank them for giving their details. 

Then at certain regular intervals you need to contact them again repeatedly.  You will get much better results if this is regular.  For example, I have now made this blog into the “Tuesday Topup”.  How often do I contact our subscribers?  The clue is in the name

And attached into this blog is a VERY powerful system to automatically email out to all our blog subscribers to tell them when a new blog message or article has been posted (subscribe on the top left if you haven’t already). 

And this email system is the same system you can use to not only capture your visitor’s contact details, but also to send out emails in the sequence which you set, at the specific times you set.   

So you can set it up to send ‘new visitor’ information straight away, then later after a period of time and after a sequence of other emails, as you build rapport and you have built up more of a relationship, you can start sending out more in-depth information. 

Or however you want to structure it. 

The true beauty of it is that once you set it up - it is totally automatic. 

For example, on www.2u.co.uk down the left side you will see a form where a visitor can fill in their first name and email and get a sequence of money saving advice for their mobile phone.  There are a number of emails that go to the subscriber over a period of time.  The first is instant, then there are a number of weekly emails which give the visitor free information on how they can save money on their mobile phone bills etc. 

The WHOLE process is completely automated. 

 I set it up about 2 years ago and have hardly touched it since.  There are hundreds of people subscribed into that list who automatically get the information they have requested.

And it is incredibly easy to set up. 

Simply go to Aweber and get yourself an account.  The benefits you get FAR outweigh the tiny cost. So get yourself an account there now if you do not already have one. 

If you do nothing else for your online business this week DO THIS NOW. 

Then you can easily create a web form (which is the form to ask for their email address etc). 

Put this into your site.  You are now up and running collecting visitor contact details so you can contact them again and again. 

Now you need to start writing the sequence of emails to go out to these potential customers after they have signed up. 

Then decide how many days after signup they will be sent. 

And that is more or less it.  Sure there are more advanced strategies, such as segmenting, but this really is the bare-bones of an automated email marketing campaign. 

Aweber give excellent tutorials on exactly how to use the system, and I will go into more detail on what extra benefits you can use to enhance your email campaign. 

But this is the real skeleton outline.  And once you have done this, you don’t need to keep doing it. 

Set it -> forget it. 

Well, almost.  You need to revisit the sequence and check it is all up to date and if you could improve it to help your customers more. 

So that’s it for today.  If you haven’t yet go to Aweber and get yourself an account. 

Don’t put it off.  There is always an excuse but just get started and slowly over time your list will build up. Do it now.  Good luck.

Next week we are going to look in closer detail at exactly what you can do to fully automate a highly successful email marketing system. 

Speak with you then, 

Duncan Ritson-Elliott

It is SO fundamental that it is often overlooked.

And it is this:

The relationship between VALUE and MONEY.

Think about everything that means and everything related to it.

Providing value to your customers.  The money that ensues.

So many people start a bussiness idea with a thought process of

“How can I get money?”

“How can I make more money?”

The trouble with this thinking is that it should start with the customer.

The better question is this:

How can I better serve my customers such that it is worth so much to them that they will give me money for it.

(I know - it could be worded better, but you get the idea)

“How can I solve their problems?”

It is all about the CUSTOMER.

DRILL this into your head …

Give VALUE that people will be WANTING TO PAY FOR.

Return On Investment = ROI.

You’ve probably heard of the term “ROI” or “Return On Investment”.

You probably heard it from a business perspective, in terms of a business getting  return (income) from their investment in (say) building a product. 

They invest in their product and hopefully when they sell it, they will make more from selling it that they put into building it.

But it is far more important to your marketing mind to be thinking of that EXACT same equation from the CUSTOMER’s point of view.

The customer is going to invest their TIME and MONEY in looking at, and potentially buying your product. 

Is it going to give them a return on their investment?

Is the customer going to see what you are offering as worth more value than the money you are asking for?

As far as the customer is concerned, will they get something worth more to them than the money they paid?

So think about the customer’s ROI.

Today, do nothing else but these 2 things:

1. Think about how you can offer more value to your customers.

2. Think about how you can better communicate to your customers what current value you are offering.

That, in essence, is marketing.

If you cannot see the video above then click here now