6 Steps to a Hands-Free Marketing Machine
by Martin Wales (excerpted from Online Marketing Superstars)
Imagine a “hands free” automatic sales and marketing machine that leaves you free to do what you want – when you want! Automation exists for thousands of merchants who have already taken in over half a billion dollars in sales in the past few years using a simple, yet powerful Internet strategy. Many merely check in remotely to find out how much money has been deposited in their accounts that day, while they pursue new ventures and personal projects.
What would you do with more free time and less hassles? You could focus on other areas to grow your business, travel, do charitable work, take more family time, or finally get to your favorite recreation or hobby. With the right online system, you can automate many of the processes needed to sell your products and services and support your customers.
If you’re an online marketer or using ecommerce to complement your existing brick and mortar business, then you’re most likely familiar with the importance of Internet marketing and shopping cart solutions. To automate these processes requires a combination of flexible, dynamic marketing systems, as well as secure credit card and order taking processes to be efficient and profitable.
The strategic use of automation defines who wins when applying ecommerce solutions. With the power of automation, you’ll see your online sales and profits excel beyond what you ever thought possible. To discover how automation works and what it can do for you, read the following strategies with references to one automated online sales and marketing tool called EasyWebAutomation.com.
Benefits of Automation
The benefits of automation are so numerous you can’t afford to ignore them. Automate your online efforts correctly and you’ll reap the rewards. The primary benefit of “hands free” marketing is selling to your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Other benefits include:
 Cost Reduction: Automation reduces your costs across the board. Everything from long distance phone bills to direct mail postage, and reducing the need for hiring additional customer service and support staff.
Easy to Run: The number one complaint of most business owners is their inability to be away from the business. Your business becomes much easier to run and your presence becomes optional with online automation. With most systems you can quickly and easily check your sales and orders from any web browser.
More Time: You gain more time to focus on priorities for the strategic growth of your company and to address those smaller problems that accumulate otherwise. This newfound discretionary time comes without your money-making activities coming to a halt, or hiring and training staff, while you finally take that vacation.
Happy Customers: Automation lets you serve your customers faster and more efficiently and raises your customer satisfaction levels. If you have employees, they can focus on other higher-value functions that demand human intervention. Automation also reduces the demand for the high cost of customer service representatives.
Targeted Marketing: While building your customer base, your prospects can be segmented. Once they respond to a specific offer, put them on a segmented list that identifies them, topics that interest them, products they want, and other personal preferences. Now you’re able to market to your prospects more efficiently and personally with custom offers to produce larger profits.
Competitive Advantage: Automation gives you an edge over your competition. You can devote more time to identify additional opportunities, enhancing customer service, and selling more to your best clients.
Strategy # 1: Grow Your Customer Base
The value of your business comes down to the size and quality of your customer base. If there’s no market demand or buyers, then your business has little value or life expectancy! Capture the names and email of prospects when they visit your web sites. The fact that they clicked to your site shows they’re interested. Rarely does a customer buy on their first visit to your site and they’re just as unlikely to ever return without an invitation and further persuasion.
Permission-based Opt-in: Seek the permission from your visitors to put them on your email list. Send them additional information or preferred access. Use an unblockable, strategic pop-over window to have an offer appear automatically. A small script, like the Easy Opt-in script provided by EasyWebAutomation, works with a time delay on entry or exit to your sites. This tactic alone instantly increases opt-in conversions by as much as 30 to 40%. Once they’ve opted in to your list, they’ve ‘raised their hand’ and identified themselves as part in your target market. Now feed them value-based, timely, rich content that encourages them to return to your site where you’re more likely to convert them into customers.
Capturing email addresses: Automate the most important role of your web site: capturing the email addresses of all your prospects. Your mailing list is critical to all your marketing and literally your most valuable asset. Offer special reports, ezines, newsletters, insider information, mini-educational courses, advice, or free trials to entice visitors to share their name and email. When the data is entered, it is automatically placed in your database and added to the appropriate list. Then, email promotions and other benefits over time to build your relationship and gradually earn prospect’s trust, leading to more sales and frequent purchases.
Automatic Response and Communication: Once you have their email address, put autoresponders to work. These automatically distributed email messages are to motivate prospects to revisit your site for the latest offers. Create customized, brief, friendly, and conversational messages as content for your autoresponders.Do you read long email? Email should be used only to direct traffic to your sites not to deliver a ton of content.
Strategy # 2: Build Relationships
The total number of purchases being made online is increasing gradually every year. However, shoppers remain as critical and demanding in their judgment of vendors. They only buy from people or businesses that they know, like, and trust.
Communicate Automatically and Frequently: Once you have an individual’s email you need to communicate with them frequently. This converts more original traffic and leads into buyers. Use autoresponders that give you the option of sending email once, or in a series. The series are more effective since this creates multiple ‘touches.’
Frequency builds trust and relationship. Controlling the frequency and intervals of messages moves your prospects forward in the sales process. Use merge codes within your autoresponders to customize and communicate in a personal manner. Merge codes automatically use specific data like the recipient’s first name, title, or company. Make sure to include personalization in subject lines, headers, and the salutation. Use multiple broadcasts for monthly newsletters, daily quotes, or stock tips. One time email, called solo broadcasts, do have their uses. For example, one-time special offers, seasonal announcements, and specific or urgent customer service bulletins.
Be SMART: Use a smart autoresponder system. It’s more intelligent than the basic autoresponder first mentioned here. The smart autoresponder directs a new lead, or potential customer email, into what is called the “hot lead” part of the responder. Picture sending out five or six autoresponder messages to a prospect and they subsequently come back to your website and make a purchase. You do not want to continue sending them a prospect message, now that they have become a paying customer. The smart autoresponder takes them off your prospect list and puts them on your customer list. Continuing communication with your customer this way makes sense.
The autoresponder is smart in other ways as well, adding to your marketing strength. Many systems have the power to serve a variety of products in the autoresponder database. For every product you’re selling there is matching product information to compile appropriate autoresponder messages. Here’s an example of just how this works:
i.) You’re offering vitamins at cost to win new business knowing it’s a consumable product and the average customer buys a 30 to 60 day supply.
ii.) When your customer makes their first, promotionally-priced vitamin purchase, the autoresponder sends out product-specific information, along with offers for other products that you sell.
iii.) After that, the autoresponder sends out reminders to the customer a few days before the 30 to 60 day supply of vitamins is finished, asking them if they’d like to stock up and buy more.
iv.) In the reminder message for another vitamin purchase there’s a direct link to that product in the shopping cart on the checkout page. How much more convenient can it be for your customers to make repeat purchases and give you recurring income?
Remember that the customers that you’re already selling to are your best sales targets and hold the maximum potential for profit. Repeat sales come from staying in touch with satisfied clients and that’s the power of automating your online business.
Work with an automated service that has unlimited list creation and unlimited email broadcasting (with NO cost per email) in their autoresponder system. Make sure you have the ability to cross-pollinate your lists and move prospects and customers from one list to another easily and automatically.
Use online automation to manage other communications that support your business like with your personal network, sales channels, the media, and suppliers.
Delivering your email: Do NOT spam. If you’re new to this, spam is unwanted and uninvited email solicitation. Use an opt-in for all your email marketing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have programs that filter spam. Be sure to avoid words identified and linked with common spam messages that prevent your lists from receiving your email. Determine what words are flagged through a spam filter database tool.
EasyWebAutomation includes free use of the Spam Assassin™ database checker. Before you send an email you can ‘test’ it to see if it will pass through the ISPs’ spam filters. In addition, work with recognized, professional organizations that are on the “white lists” of all the major ISPs, such as AOL, MSN, and RoadRunner.
Strategy # 3: Increase Customer Confidence
To build your online business it’s vital that you have an ecommerce plan. Letting your customers place orders on your website is the major component. The key to the most profitable ecommerce today is the ability to influence prospects to confidently share their personal and financial data while making purchases.
‘Pushing’ your shopping cart: You’ll notice a little shopping cart icon on many retail websites. Or perhaps when you click on a product, you’re invited to add it your shopping cart. A shopping cart is at the heart of your selling process online. No cart – no orders! What better way to assist consumers than with a shopping cart that operates in exactly the same way it would in a grocery store?
How a shopping cart works: Picture this: you’re cruising down the aisles while pushing your shopping cart along grabbing items and adding them to your cart. At the checkout you make the final decision about the items and discard any you don’t want. An online shopping cart works in exactly the same way. Carts are used by millions of websites worldwide.
Instant Delivery: Demand a shopping cart system that handles automatic digital product delivery. Net shoppers want to download your product instantly if it’s software, music, or digital information, like an ebook. This is important because when it comes to the Internet today, timing is everything! Failing to take advantage of a shopping cart system severely limits your online capabilities.
Is it safe?: This remains the most frequently asked question about online shopping. A few years ago most people were concerned about using their credit cards online. With ever-evolving security features on Internet browsers these days, using your credit cards online is actually safer than using it at the local gas station. Implementing an online shopping cart makes it much safer to use credit cards online. A shopping cart employs something called a digital converter. You’re given a secure certificate ensuring that your credit card and personal information is encrypted through the Internet browser. This makes it impossible for anyone to grab your data and steal it. The presentation of your order form and shopping cart application increases the trust your customer has in your online order system and makes them more likely to purchase. Point out any and all the security features on your site with written explanations and related logos and symbols.
Strategy # 4: Take Orders Online
When you’re taking orders online for your business, there are a several factors you must address. Your ecommerce strategy involves:
i.) Order Forms - Once you’ve convinced your prospect traffic to buy your goods, they’ll click to your Order Form. Free shopping cart services online give you basic, bare-bones forms that don’t look related to your company. However, with a superior and more adaptable system you can customize the HTML code to present your own custom, branded Order Form. At a minimum put your logo at the top of the page to maintain your site’s look and feel. Additional suggestions include repeating benefits, clearly showing shipping and handling, restating your guarantee, and including and indicating what security features are in place. Together these contribute to the decreasing shopping cart abandonment and increasing your sales.
ii.) Multi-media Trust - You might consider appearing in or using audio or video clips on your Order Forms to provide helpful directions and confirm the sale. When prospects see and hear you, it helps to further establish trust with you especially if you’re personally and emphatically stating a guarantee.
iii.) PayPal - You can be selling online within 15 minutes, if you choose to accept payments through PayPal.com. As a third-party processor, they take customers’ credit cards on your behalf and forward payment to your PayPal account minus their fee.
iv.) Merchant Accounts - Today, it’s a lot easier than in the past to open your own merchant account to accept credit card payments. Services called ‘gateways’ compare your customer’s credit card number against the personal information they enter, confirm and approve it. Then they notify the appropriate creditor, such as VISA, MasterCard, or AmEx, to deposit the money in your bank account.
The shopping cart is the area in the online sales process where your customers are going to change their mind and leave your website without completing their purchases. Shopping cart abandonment can be as high as 75 to 85%. You must make sure your online ordering process is as efficient as possible and apply as many relationship and trust building tactics as possible.
Strategy # 5: Use a FREE Sales Force! You Don’t Pay Until After They Sell
Automating your sales process goes beyond your web site and your own efforts. The top sellers online invite others to refer and sell their products on a 100% commission-only payment plan.
Your FREE Sales Force: Invite resellers, called “affiliates” online, to become part of your Affiliate Program and watch your sales and profits go through the roof! You pay commissions only after sales are made and confirmed. Plus, while it’s recommended that you provide your affiliates with sales support, training and templates, they generally use their own resources, time, money, and relationships to sell YOUR products.
Affiliate Control: When using EasyWebAutomation, only several clicks are needed to set up an entire Affiliate Program for all your products. Identify and reward your best affiliate partners by using the automated commission reports to track top performers. Variable commission levels pay out more to your star sales affiliates. Setting up unique affiliate programs for every individual product gives you more flexibility to set commission rates and especially to protect your profit margins.
Sales administration: Track all your sales information. Automation provides dynamic sales administration to monitor your sales from anywhere Internet access is available. All information is real time data. Tracking reveals how your business is doing. Your automation solution should track various data, such as reports by product, day, and credit card brands used by your customers. When you know which campaigns or products are the most profitable, further concentrate your efforts there and duplicate your success elsewhere.
Strategy # 6: Test and Track Your Online Marketing
Testing and tracking bring you extremely valuable data to measure and improve your online effectiveness. For example, ad tracking counts how many click-throughs your links get on the Internet. Links might include Google Ads, or other Pay Per Click advertising, banner ads, text links, and affiliate links. Ad tracking determines how many times a banner was clicked and calculates how much revenue was generated from that particular ad. You know how many times a visitor was directed to your website from an individual link and made a purchase. Many systems evaluate the cost of each click related to the revenue generated. It also includes a ‘Split Testing’ tool to compare three variations of the same web page, like your home page, to get real-time market research on what works best. Each time a new visitor comes they’re cycled through Page A, B or C. Assess your marketing and make any necessary changes to continually improve your online sales results.
Conclusion
The Internet is extremely competitive. The right strategy combined with powerful and practical systems gives you an edge over your competitors. You’ll attract more customers and spend less time, money, and energy winning them over. By automating your sales and marketing processes online, you’ll see big profits sooner and more often! Automation services and software leverage the best technology available to make you money day and night, whether you’re there or not!
* The solution discussed here was selected because it provides an affordable, all-in-one system. And, it’s a completely comprehensive package for automating and executing your winning strategy online. EasyWebAutomation is a one-stop, one-shop solution for entrepreneurs looking to add or enhance their Internet and email marketing, autoresponder systems, order forms, shopping carts, online credit card processing, affiliate programs, sales reporting and ebusiness administration. For more information, visit EasyWebAutomation.com
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