Improve your marketing and sales with some auto responder Improvements. Try some of these:

1. Publish free reports to send via your auto responder. The reports should be related to your business or web site & contain info, ads and links to your sites. People love getting freebies

2. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey to send via auto responder to those who sign up on your site in exchange for a free eBook, software or trial period at your membership site.  This type of information will help you understand their needs, likes & dislikes better.

3. Instead of answering each customer question that is e-mailed to you, publish “Frequently Ask Questions” and make them available via auto responder to those who sign up. To save time and support headaches.

4. Instead of publishing all of your customer testimonials or endorsements on your website, publish only a few there. And set up an auto responder form that invites visitors to receive a complete list via your autoresponder. Give them a power-packed list; it’s more effective to include all of them.

Mix and match. Change your auto responder strategy to change your auto responder results!

Top sales pros confirm that it often takes seven or more communications or sales messages before prospective customers make a purchase. They also confirm that itís generally easier to sell to a referral, because someone they know gave positive testimonial about their products or services.

What would happen if you combined both of these powerful ideas? A nifty and thrifty two-step. Try this two-step tip:

1. Collect leads with your auto responder. Ask for mailing addresses and telephone numbers, too, for additional ways to follow up with each person. When you download the e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses and other information from those who requested additional information from your auto responder, follow up multiple ways. Send postcards. Call. Mail sales letters and other promotional pieces.

2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer in an insert, direct marketing package and / or .pdf to be made available via auto responder. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material. Then send to the people in #1 above with monthly updates, announcements of new sales and products / services, and a request for referrals.

So why not improve your closing ratio and reach out even farther at the same time? Do the two-step!

The Internet offers many means of affordable marketing with auto responders. Here are a couple of popular ways of using them.

DIRECTORY

Some webmasters set up link or article directories on their sites. They create a directory on a specific industry topic, placing their own ad or banner along the top. Then they invite others to add their website links via a link exchange program, listing themselves in your directory. Or they invite articles to be submitted that include a resource box at the bottom of each with a link to the authorís website. This results on increased traffic as sites link up across the World Wide Web. Enter “link exchange software” or “article directory software” into a favorite search engine for help with each.

TEACH A COURSE

Some marketers write up a simple step-by-step instructional class in their area of expertise. Then they break it up into smaller portions or messages and set them up in an auto responder as email messages, including short ads within each message to invite sales & website visits. Then they invite website visitors to sign up through on online form or email subscription address offered through the auto responder service. As people sign up, they will learn more about the products and services through the teaching series.

Huh?! If you haven’t ever heard this term before, you need to run (yes, run don’t walk) and by Seth Godin’s book, “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”.

Imagine driving down a beautiful rural highway when suddenly you see the most extraordinary cow. He’s big, muscular, black and white (like most cows we see) - but he is truly remarkable, unlike any “normal” cow we’ve ever seen. Well, we take note. As we continue to drive we see a few more of these “remarkable” cows. As we see more and more of them, the become less remarkable until we no longer notice them at all.

No imagine that this cow is a bright shiny purple - I think it would be something that we’d  never forget. This is  exactly Seth’s idea.

I started thinking about Seth’s Purple Cow after reading his blog post titled “How to title stuff“.

He gives us 3 ways:

1. Pick a completely descriptive, generic, boring name that precisely describes what’s inside. Like “Shredded Wheat” or “12 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog. This is the one  that Google likes. . .
2. Pick a more clever name that’s designed to entice the reader to read the subtitle, or the first few lines of your post. Your visitor likes this one. . .
3. Pick a name that gets talked about. To create a phrase that you hope will enter the vocabulary.

Now I usually try a combo of numbers 1 and 2, but number 3 is pretty powerful. Seth’s is famous for coing the “Purple Cow”.

Seth Says: Yes, that’s my strategy. My goal is to have people call something a Purple Cow or eviscerate the boss for suggesting yet another Meatball Sundae.

Yes, he coined the  term “Meatball Sundae”.

If  for some reason you don’t know about Seth Godin, you are doing yourself a disservice, seek him out, pay attention and learn.

Coming up with a clever title for something you are doing might be one way. Being innovative in the way you do business is something far more powerful!

In his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Seth Godin says that the key to success is to find a way to stand out–to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins. Godin himself may be the best example of how this theory works: The marketing expert is a demigod on the Web, a best-selling author, highly sought after lecturer, successful entrepreneur, respected pundit and high-profile blogger. He is uniquely respected for his understanding of the Internet, and his essays and opinions are widely read and quoted online and off.”

Forbes.com

So what the hell is linkbaiting you ask. . .

Well, let me spell it out for you. Linkbaiting is a method to get other sites to link to your site. There are a lot of ways to do this including, giving away tools, having contests, being a really compelling blooger among others.

Darren Rowse gives us a pretty good list of linkbaiting techniques on Problogger.com.

In his list he includes some things like controversy and attack (to create controversy). Controversy maybe, but  if you are running a business site, the attack method may not be the best plan.