Autoresponders are important when building your email list aka your database of leads.

It is one of the many impressions your prospects have of your brand before they engage you.

For many business owners such as yourself, it’s your goal to attract and convert leads into customers.

If you’re one of those owners who creates a lot of content online, be it video, blogs, social media or publishing audio, your main goal is, most likely to attract the audience to your business, make them follow your brand then turn them into leads and eventually into customers.

(By the way, you should also read this post on how to build your list through podcasting and social media if you haven’t already! We cover strategies on list building!)

This is where Autoresponder emails can be powerful for you as a business owner.

In this post you’ll learn about what an Autoresponder is, how and where to use it, as well as what to include in an Autoresponder email.

(For some reason I always write Autoresponders with a capital A – so let’s just leave it like that, shall we? :))

Let’s begin by defining Autoresponders.

WHAT IS AN AUTORESPONDER?

If you look up Wikipedia, an Autoresponder is defined as:

a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. They can be very simple or quite complex.

But at Bumper Leads, we define Autoresponders from a marketing point-of-view as:

the first email a subscriber receives when they perform an action online such as subscribe to a newsletter or download a lead magnet.

The Autoresponders are pre-written emails that are automatically delivered to your customers depending on what action they take.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF AN EMAIL AUTORESPONDER?

An Autoresponder email can be used in many different ways, not just for greeting your new subscribers.

Think about the ways your customers interact with you online. Where do you ask them to input their details?

At Bumper Leads we use Autoresponders when:

• A customer books a call with us online
• When a lead requests our lead magnet through an opt-in
• Contacts us via our contact us form
• Registers at one of our events
• When they buy a product online

And we even use Autoresponders when onboarding new customers.

In some of the above scenarios, an Autoresponder is simply a confirmation email.

For example, when a customer buys a product online they’d receive a Thank You For Your Purchase email. If they registered for an event, they’d receive a Thank You For Registering for Our Event email and so on.

HOW TO USE AUTORESPONDER EMAILS WITH LEAD MAGNETS?

To answer this question, think about the following:

Most of the website visitors don’t care about your business.

It may sound harsh but, what they really care about is how you or your business can solve their problem.

If you don’t show them who you are and how you solve their problem in less than 5 seconds, they’ll just leave your site.

It’s true in most cases, the majority of visitors that land on your website don’t convert.

This is a wasted opportunity if you have no ways of capturing at least a fraction of those visitors.

So how can you capture at least 5% of your website traffic?

By introducing something called a Lead Magnet on your website.

A lead magnet is a quick, easy-to-digest downloadable that solves one problem for your potential customer.

An example of a lead magnet could be:

• An eBook
• A short email course
• A free chapter of your new book
• A how-to video
• A Quiz
• An online store customer loyalty discount
• Swipe Files, infographics, and so on.

Let’s use ebook as an example here.

When your customer downloads an ebook, they’ll receive the eBook including a simple Welcome To Our Tribe email as an Autoresponder email.

Now, for the million-dollar question:

WHAT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR WELCOME AUTORESPONDER EMAIL?

The team at Bumper Leads has been testing various lead magnets through their side-hustles. Yes, most of our team members have online side-hustles.

The reason for this is that it keeps us on our toes with anything to do with digital marketing.

So far we’ve tested various lead magnets: ebooks, checklists, how-to videos, short email courses, even an audio book.

Depending on your audience, we found the best lead magnets are short email courses. Daily emails delivered in drip fashion over 3-5 days. (For some businesses, such as consultants and coaches we found quizzes have a higher conversion rate)

What should your Autoresponder email and the leading nurture sequence be about?

We found the best Autoresponder emails are the ones related to your Lead Magnet.

If your lead magnet is about a common problem your potential customers experience, then it’s easy to write the copy for the subsequent nurturing emails.

An example lead magnet could be:

• 10 Ways to create an engaging Autoresponder sequence so you can convert more leads into customers.
• Does your website pass the 5-second test with your customers? (this is our one, go grab it here)

OVER TO YOU

First off, do you have a way of capturing leads on your website? If so, have you created an Autoresponder email series yet?

Btw, if you find it difficult to build your email list through content creation then I recommend you read our post on Building list through podcasting. There’s a few gold nuggets in there as we share our number one List Building Strategy.

We’ve also written a post on conversion metrics  where we cover important metrics for business owners to follow so they know exactly where to focus their attention on (and stop wasting time on marketing channels that don’t work). For example, knowing how to read stats is a great way to know when it’s time to pivot in your business and start investing business resources where they’re needed.