Are you looking to build a list? If you have no idea what I am talking about, then this post is surely going to help you out. Email marketing, or building a list, is a big aspect of online businesses. What it allows you to do is collect email information for the visitors on your website (usually in exchange for some sort of information) so you can re-market products and services to these people, potentially forever.
The value of this is that often times you get very relevant traffic to your website but they are not always interested in “buying” something right away. If you are recommending a product or service through an affiliate program on your website and they don’t buy it, then you have in essence LOST that customer for ever.
That is where email marketing comes in. Sure, your website visitors may not be interested in buying something, but they may be interested in exchanging their email address for something that is valuable to them. This could be a bonus, a guide, a webinar…information. Things that are easily replicated by you (digital in format) and don’t have much overhead in terms of time and money.
But How Do You Manage Emails. Auotresponders.
Obviously there are smart ways to run your business and there are “not so smart” ways. The silly way to run an email marketing campaign would be to try to manage all the emails and information you collect by yourself and try to email out offers and information.
You would probably only last a few emails before you would lose your account for “spam” rules. In fact, NOBODY does this.
Instead, affiliate marketers use what are called autoresponders. Like the name indicates, you can automatically set-up and manage email marketing campaigns and very complex ones through various “services”. This not only saves you a ton of time and energy, it can lead to substantial income through your email marketing efforts.
Think of it this way, if you can create a relationship with your audience and you can build trust with them, there is a good chance that a single email address (person) that opts into your email list will lead to SEVERAL sales.
So unlike conventional affiliate links that you have on your website where you only have ONE opportunity to sell, you are going to have multiple opportunities. This can lead to a higher rate of sales, and also repeat buyers…and subsequently more income.
But there are so many services out there in this space, which “autoresponder” do you choose?
The Top 5 Autoresponders for Affiliate Marketers
There are five main autoresponder & email marketing management platforms that I recommend and all of them are very established in the industry. Sometimes feeling like choosing a politician, often times choosing an autoresponder can be choosing the “best of the worst”, but there are definitely some legitimate services that I would recommend.
With any autoresponder or any company in the email space, you have to be careful not to expect perfection though. Email is not always reliable and there are so many potential issues that a company running these services could experience (spam, regulations, abusive customers, white listing emails, blacklisting, etc), that you have to be careful not to choose a new company just because they state that they are the “best”.
Here are my 5 recommended Autoresponders. You can’t go wrong with any of these, you will hear positive and negatives of them all simply because of what I said above (email is not always 100% reliable), but I can assure you that having experience with all of them they do offer good experiences.
#1: Aweber.com
#2: GetResponse.com
#3: MadMimi.com
#4: MailChimp.com
I personally use Aweber.com for most of my affiliate marketing campaigns, although they are far from perfect, they are quite reliable and I find them to be quite progressive. Their opt-in forms and lead pages could be a little more “bleeding edge”, but overall I am quite happy.
As an aside, you should avoid MailChimp if you are marketing within the “make money” or “dieting” spaces. They are not huge fans of these niches and if you are going to market and sell products or services within this space, I suggest using another autoresponder company.
Some companies just are not willing to take on the risk of certain niches and those two have the tendency to have the most spammers and scammers.
If you have any questions about affiliate marketing, which autoresponders you should be using for your affiliate marketing campaigns, or any aspect of affiliate marketing, please leave your comments below and we will be more than happy to help you out.
Hi, Just starting out, and I want to do it right, cheaper and have an income as quickly as possible to pay debt and get some things I desperately need. Things are going well other than I have no idea how to put together an email list quickly. Are there ways?
Thank you,
Kathy Berry
Yes, there are ways you can be efficient with email marketing campaigns and software. This is something that we recommend that you consider once you have adequate traffic (an audience) coming to your website, but I don’t recommend it when starting out because it will be a lot of legwork without the traffic.
I recommend that your first focus with any website becomes content, traffic and rankings.
I have been using MailChimp for the last three years and I absolutely love it. I don’t have any complaints whatsoever. As for converting an email into consistent income, that is another issue altogether.
If you have any suggestions on how to maximize conversion through my autoresponder I would love to hear them guys.
The most common problem we see when it comes to email marketing is a constant effort to sell sell sell. What you need to remember is that their are human beings on the other end of every single email that you get. It all comes to relationship building and that is exactly what the key to email marketing is.
You need to vary Your follow-up sequence in a way where people feel like they are getting way more out of the relationship in terms of value versus promotions. A recommendation would be a 5 to 1 ratio, Not to say that in some of your value based emails you are going to be able to promote certain things. It just depends how complimentary a promotion is to the value based email.
We know it’s a cliché but they say to lead with your best foot. Take that approach with your email campaigns and you’re going to be just fine.
What sort of budget should I be looking at with an autoresponder. I was just looking at click funnels and they seem to be pretty expensive and are out of my range. I do like their clean designs though and am wondering if any of these other services you mentioned offer nice lead capture pages.
An autoresponder doesn’t have to cost you that much. For example, here is a break down of the costs of the top 3:
Aweber.com is $19 per month for 500 subscribers. They have a free 30 day trial and they include all sorts of tools that you can utilize to build lead pages and opt-in forms on your website. Although not as beautiful as leadpages.net or clickfunnels capture pages, they will definitely suffice.
GetResponse.com is $15 per month for 1,000 subscribers. They are a great service as well, and they have some really awesome looking lead capture pages. So if you use a service like GetResponse, they will completely replace the need for these other types of services.
Madmimi.com is free for 100 leads, $10 for 500 subscribers. So it is the most cost efficient of the bunch and you can try it out for free if you like. The design options of capture forms is much more limited than the others, but overall it is a pretty solid service.
So choose the one according to you and for the price of one month over at these other more expenses lead page type platforms, you could test all 3 of these and see which one best suits you. Definitely some room for a lot of cost savings there for your autoresponder and funnel building service Steve.
I have been using aweber for around 4 years and I have a list of over 13,000 emails on my list. Although that isn’t huge after 4 years, I still do make consistent money through email marketing and outside the rising costs as my list grows I think aweber is a solid program.
I have had a few frustrating points over the years and have considered switching, it just seems like too much work though!
If you were to switch from aweber to something else, do you think it would be worthwhile and if so which service would you recommend I switch to?
If you are fine and happy with your autoresponder service (Aweber), we don’t actually recommend that you switch to a new one. That can be a painful process and when switching from email providers, you may all of a sudden find your emails going into a spam box.
Yes, these companies have import processes that are quite efficient. But there are going to be other things that you need to weight like learning a new interface, new management tools for your lists, and different tools and designs for capturing opt-ins (things that you won’t exactly be able to import with ease).
If you are happy with aweber.com’s service, definitely keep things there.