Autoresponders are supremely handy tools. In fact, if you’re an internet marketer you probably can’t live without them. However, autoresponders are not created equally. Some offer more than others. Some are quite expensive. If you don’t need the bells and whistles, your money is probably better spent elsewhere. Choosing the right autoresponder for your business needs is important.

How Many People Are on Your List?

Many autoresponder services are free until your list reaches a certain number. For example, they might be free to use until you have 1000 subscribers. They then charge a fee per 500 or 1000 subscribers. So you’ll pay the same amount whether you have 1100 or 1900 subscribers. Once you go over 2000, then you hit the next fee level.

While you may be comfortable with the first few fee tiers, look ahead. Make sure the fees for that large list you’re going to grow won’t be exorbitant. Make sure the per subscriber fee makes sense for your business and your budget.

How Customizable Is It?

Some autoresponder services are very basic. Others seem to be infinitely customizable. Being able to customize the look and feel of your email messages helps brand. However, you might not need all those bells and whistles. Take a look at what you really need to grow your email list and profit. Then compare services based on those features.

Does It Offer the Features You Need?

Some autoresponder services are newsletters only. Others offer the ability to deliver digital files. Outline the purpose for your autoresponder. Make a list of the things you need it to be able to accomplish. Do you need to deliver files with your autoresponder? If so, then look for one that has that capability.

Is the Autoresponder Compliant?

It’s important for the reputation of your business to be CAN-SPAM compliant. Most autoresponder services respect that need. They offer the email list management tools and features to ensure you’re compliant. However, it pays to double check. Make sure they offer automatic unsubscribe. Make sure they also offer a double opt-in procedure.

Is It Easy to Use?

Take a look at some autoresponder interfaces and you feel as if you need a tech degree. They can be quite confusing. Others are simple and straightforward. Make sure, before you pay good money, that the interface is easy to use. Take a free trial. Watch the video demonstrations. If you need help or have questions, call customer service.

Finally, triple check the reputation of the service. You want to make sure the autoresponder service has a good reputation. You want to make sure they have good customer service. And you want to ensure they’re going to be around ten years from now. To your success!

Many websites, blogs, and courses give advice on e-mail marketing but most assume you already have a list. The problem is, there are many virtual assistants out there (possibly you) who haven’t started a list yet. You may be still trying to decide HOW to get started and what program to use. If that’s you, keep reading to learn the fundamentals of starting an e-mail list.

One of the most important decisions you will make in building your e-mail list is the ESP or E-mail Service Provider. Your e-mail service provider is the company you choose to host your e-mail list. Having a company host your mailing list provides you with many advantages.

The thing that stalls most people in their tracks is they don’t really know what they should be looking for in an ESP. Here is a list of my must-have features:

• High deliverability of e-mails – There’s no point in building a list if your e-mails won’t get delivered. Make sure the program you choose has a very high deliverability rate.
   
• Both broadcast and autoresponder options – Broadcast is when you set up a message to be sent out immediately or at a certain day/time. A broadcast is going to go out to your full e-mail list and won’t be resent. Autoresponders are e-mails that are set up to be delivered automatically after someone signs up to your list. So it works like this: Sally signs up to your cake decorating e-mail list and on the first day she gets autoresponder #1, then four days later she gets #2, then four days later she gets #3, etc. As a coach, virtual assistant, or other service provider who uses e-mail marketing, you want both options as they’ll be useful to you in many ways while you work to reach your market.
• Top notch customer service – When you need help it should be there, period.
• Personalization of e-mails – Adding personalization to your e-mails is a great way to increase interest and conversions. You can personalize e-mails with first name but you can also use functions like where they live, what hobbies they have, or other categories to call out your prospects.
• Multiple e-mail lists hosting – Some programs only allow you to host one e-mail list. You will likely want to keep separate e-mail lists for different websites, topics, or even to separate customers from potential customers.
   
• HTML and Text e-mail creation – Some people prefer to send plain text e-mails while others like to add images and hyperlinks through an HTML e-mail. This is a preference issue, but I would always choose an ESP with both so that if you change your mind down the road it’s easy to do the switch from one to the other.
   
• Easy and flexible sign up form creation – Once you’ve done the initial list setup you need to get people signing up! Having a user friendly signup form from the perspective of the business owner and the subscriber is important.
   
• Statistics tracking – If you’re sending out e-mails without knowing the results then it’s very difficult to be successful. Proper tracking will allow you to see how many people opened your e-mails, how many clicked, how many signed up per day, etc.
   
• BONUS: Templates – Sign up form and e-mail templates will be helpful to you if you don’t have design skills. There are some companies that make it very quick and easy to get a professional looking e-mail campaign going.

The best way to figure out if a program is the right one for you is to do your research first, then see if you can take a trial of the program. I’ve worked with numerous list manager programs over the years and the program that I like the most and recommend is Aweber. I can honestly say that, having used it myself and for many clients for the past few years, I’ve only had good experiences with the program deliverability, features, integration with other programs, and technical support. You can sign up here for a $1 trial  (affiliate link)

Your e-mail list is one of the biggest assets you will ever have in your virtual assistant business. Take some time to set it up right and that initial investment of time and effort will pay off in multiples for years and years to come.

I recently read an article on Aweber’s blog, the post topic being thank you pages, and the author commented on how shocked he was that a “frightening number” of people don’t take advantage of customized thank you pages and just use the default placeholder page provided by Aweber.

I was a little surprised to read why… It was not that people didn’t know about the thank you page or how to create one – No. The main reason people were not putting any effort into their thank you pages was because they didn’t want to take the time to create one.

Just to clarify, and it may be a little confusing because the “thank you” page may mean different things to different people depending on which autoresponder service you use, but the thank you page I am referring to is the page that a subscriber is taken to right after pressing the “Submit” button. For example, if you were to sign up for my free forms on virtualassistantforms.com, once you clicked on the submit button, you’d be taken to this thank you page.

When signing up for free reports, tip sheets, or teleseminars that use an autoresponder, you will most likely be taken to a page that says something like “thanks for subscribing, check your inbox.” Other times you may be redirected back to the home page. Or you may even be treated to Aweber’s ho-hum default page (I kid because I love . You may be wondering what is the big deal? Good grief, it’s only a page. But it’s a very important page and I’ll tell you why.

Whatever you are selling or giving away, the goal of the traffic flow – the process taken by the subscriber during sign-up and confirmation – is to be an impressive, effortless, and dynamic experience – not a boring, confusing, or worse, ineffective one!

The thank you page plays a big role because the primary purpose of this page is to instruct the subscriber what to do next. If the person doesn’t know what to do immediately after signing up, he or she may lose interest, and you may be losing out on a sale or a client. Think about it, if the person does not confirm their email, the e-mail address will never be added to your list. And in the case of Aweber’s program, the address will ultimately drop off the list after a number of days.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time and money putting together an effective page. As you saw from my example above, it’s a basic page that I can re-use for most other lists but with a couple of changes: I remind the person what they signed up for (forms) and what they need to do next (confirm the e-mail by clicking on the link).

Feel like getting creative? Here are just a few ideas of what you can do to jazz up your thank you page:

• Incorporate screen shots that depict exactly what the incoming email will look like or what the person needs to click on
• Add audio (check out Aweber’s thank you page for an example)
• Add video! Perry Lawrence can show you how at http://www.askmrvideo.com

Building a thank you page and the confirmation page (the page redirected to after confirming the email – a whole new topic!) may take a little time but it’s worth it!

Web form placement is perhaps one of the most important decisions you will make. This article will go over web form placement and the pros and cons of using pop-up forms.

Placement of Web Forms

The most important point to remember when creating web forms is this: people really don’t like to work. If you make the form hard to find or require a lot of fields to fill-in, it may discourage the potential client from signing up.

Display the web form “above the fold” - put it somewhere near the top of the screen so that the person does not have to scroll down to find it. You can also put another sign-up box near the bottom, nothing says you cannot have more than one form on any page, it all depends on the content.

Use the web form to complement the page, not detract from it. One example is if you have a web page that contains an article. You probably do not want your sign up form front and center as the purpose of the particular page is to get the reader to read your article. In this case, it may be a good idea to add the sign-up box only to the bottom of the page. Reason being that the person is so impressed with what you have to say, they will sign up on the spot. Ok, maybe in my world that is how I’d like it to work : )

The goal here is to bridge the gap, appeal to your visitors’ interests, and provide a way for them to sign up for your list without being pushy or obnoxious.

Should You Use Pop-Ups?

When you hear “pop-ups,” you may think of pop-up ads or pop-up banners, both considered to be annoying and intrusive marketing tactics. But you have to admit that pop-ups work in that they grab the reader’s attention, if only for a short time.

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In order for any of your other e-Marketing strategies to work, you need a mechanism for capturing the email addresses of your website visitors. An autoresponder service will do that for you - that and much, much more! Autoresponders (an automatic response sent by email) have come a long way. While they used to be limited to messages such as “out of office,” “on vacation,” or “your mail could not be delivered because…”, today’s robust and varied autoresponder services provide a host of useful and varied applications.

Here is my “top 10″ list on ways to integrate autoresponders into your e-marketing:

1. Publish a newsletter. Your newsletter can keep your website visitors informed about your services or products, while building your reputation as a credible expert in your particular business.

2. Stay in touch with customers. Notify your customers of special offers or discounts in the future. It is much easier to sell something new to an existing customer, then to get a brand new customer.

3. Invite affiliates. Provide exclusive information about your affiliate program via an autoresponder. You can include links to “hidden” pages that aren’t linked from anywhere on your website. So the only way “in” is to request the autoresponder. These pages may contain graphics, promotional articles, and text links that affiliates can use to earn commissions by referring you.

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Personalizing your emarketing items, such as newsletters, broadcasts, etc. is not new; most people who use email regularly are used to seeing their first names in email subject lines or within an email newsletter. And, if you regularly send out emails to your subscribers, you probably have remembered the “first name” merge code by heart.

But many of you may be wondering, “What is the effectiveness of personalizing my emails?” “Does it really work?” “What else can I do besides add a name to the subject line?”

According to emailstatcenter.com, “Inserting a person’s name into an email increases open rates by as much as 10%. – Jupiter Research (2006).” So it does seem that personalizing emails does have an impact, even just a little bit. But the trick is to personalize correctly.

I would bet that you have received at least one or two emails that read like the following: “For {FIRST_NAME} , free ebook covers this weekend only.”

Um, that there should be something else before that comma. Yuck.

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“Welcome” emails are those emails that are sent to your new subscribers as soon as they sign up for your newsletter list. These emails provide a golden opportunity not only to welcome the new user, but increase credibility, promote other products, and show you off as the professional that you are.

Here is a great article that shows some examples of good and bad “welcome” emails.

http://www.varien.com/ecommerce/usability-welcome-emails/

I can see that one thing that makes a big difference (and missing with my own emails) is color!  Need to get on that right now…

Online entrepreneurs, I’m sure that you have heard many times that one of the most vital things that you must do is “build your mailing list.” Your “list” being the names and e-mail addresses of those people in your niche who have either signed up for your services or purchased a product or are interested in what you have to offer. Why? Because these are the interested prospects that you can market to over and over again.

But where do you begin? Some of the most often-asked questions I hear are, “How do I get people to sign up for my list?” “How do I create a sign-up form?” “Where should I put a sign-up box?” This article is part one of two articles in which I’ll answer these questions and more. This first article will discuss why you should use a list manager program and the basics of what to include when setting up your web form.

The first thing you will need to do is purchase a list management program or service, such as Aweber or Constant Contact. The biggest reasons are: 1) the programs are centrally managed and off-site (broken hard drive + no back up = no list), 2) these programs can handle subscribes and unsubscribes with ease, and 3) once setup, the process is automated.

Once you are setup with your list manager, create a sign-up box on your website and/or blog to capture names and e-mail addresses. Sounds easy doesn’t it?

Here are four things to remember when setting up your sign-up form.

1. Put a form on every page of your website. The reason for this is because you never know from which page the potential prospect is going to enter your site. Users rarely will type in your URL and enter your site through the home page; they will most likely land on a web page after searching through a browser using key words or key phrases.

2. Answer the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) question. Include the answer  next to the sign-up box by giving details about what benefits the prospect will receive if they sign up for your mailing list. These days it’s not enough to just receive a newsletter – give them something of value such as a special report, top ten list, or a free mini e-course.

3. Set expectations by letting them know what it is that they will be receiving and how often. You should also include a link to your privacy policy or state briefly “we will never give away your e-mail address.” The goal here is to reduce friction, remove obstacles, and eliminate fear since identity theft and spam are still big concerns for many people.

4. Thank them. I cannot state this enough, thank these people for taking the time to sign up. Thank them and mean it. Set up your list manager program so that once someone has signed up, he or she is redirected to a thank you page letting them know what is coming next and if there is anything else he or she needs to do, such as confirm an e-mail address.

5. Bonus -Welcome e-mail. This adds a nice touch if you have an autoresponder program. A “Welcome to” e-mail can be used to restate expectations, give more information about the publication, e-course, etc., when it will be sent and how often. More importantly, you are building trust and establishing a rapport between you and your prospects.

Setting up the list manager, whether it is just to send a newsletter or an entire e-course, can be a daunting task and many of you simply do not have the time to do it. This is a perfect task to delegate to your virtual assistant! The most important take-away, however, is to get your web form in place. You can always go back and fine tune the sign-up process, replace the free item, or change the text on your opt-in e-mail. It does not have to be perfect – it just has to be up.