Take Your Campaign Off Auto-Pilot
Email Template Design - Marc Kline - March 29th, 2007 - Permalink
Using an autoresponder service helps to automate a portion of your communications with your prospects, customers, and other contacts. This, in turn, helps to save you time by answering commonly asked questions before they need to be asked.
But before you resign to put the entire campaign on auto-pilot, let’s talk about the benefits of soliciting feedback from your subscribers.
Why Request Feedback?
Take the time to solicit responses from your subscribers because:
- No matter how thoroughly you cover what you’re trying to communicate, there will always be questions.
Have you ever been to a seminar or a lecture? Time permitting, they almost always have Q & A sessions at the end (much like our weekly webinars). Lingering questions help only to decrease confidence in your campaign. Answered questions, by contrast, have the opposite, more positive effect.
- Encouraging subscribers to respond reinforces the fact you’re a real, live person, not a copy writing robot.
You should work to make your messages as personal as possible, almost in the format of a discussion with listening ears. Even for the many subscribers who simply won’t contact you, it can help to give them a feeling that you are available should they need anything.
How to Request it
To encourage feedback, you can take a couple of approaches:
- Include a line or two in the signature you use for your messages.
Do you have any questions? Please don’t hesitate to contact me by hitting the ‘Reply’ button in your e-mail program. I’d be happy to discuss them with you.
- Send a special message in your follow up sequence, or an occasional broadcast.
By sending a message with feedback as the primary purpose, you can highlight your availability as a benefit to your campaign.
Make sure you have a valid e-mail address you check regularly set as the ‘From/Reply’ address for your lists. If you don’t, there is no way you’ll be able to correspond with subscribers.
It is said that good communication is a two-way street. It’s a good idea to encourage subscribers to contact you to help to foster the kind of relationship that makes them comfortable purchasing from you, returning to your website, or whatever the goals of your email campaigns are.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under Email Template Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Helpful idea!
I already include a "please ask me your questions" line in my sig line, and this idea about a specific autoresponder titled "Do you Have Any Questions, {name}?" is great - I’m going to try it!
Thanks and God Bless
March 29th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Good idea of encouraging readers to communicate back, I will use this in my email template as well, thanks
March 30th, 2007 at 10:32 am
I agree with the postings already made - of course the other advantage is that the questions asked give you more material for future emails or articles on your website.
Thanks Marc.
March 30th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Hi Marc,
Thanks for the tips. I’m going to add this to my signature line in my next newsletter. It’s good to be easily approachable.
March 31st, 2007 at 5:43 am
Yes, feedback is super important, in this way you know what your customers think and what they want to know. It’s easier to help them to solve their problems and you win credibility and respect.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:17 am
Great tips as usual. Feedback from customers, to me, is one of the most valuable benefits of autoresponders.
Thanks again Marc.
April 4th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Marc,
I just put up my autoresponder at BuyInstantly.com and will keep this in mind on my follow up emails. Great tip!
April 5th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Marc,
It’s good to know that somebody is finally listening to some of the requests of their subscribers. For several months as a newbie to Internet marketing, I found not getting the response that I needed in the early stages was rather off-puting. You can’t do everything by autoresponder and Tom Kulger confirmed this through his personal touch and follow ups. I wasn’t ready to purchase a service from AWeber when he was courting my attention, but I knew that I would be using his service as soon as I am ready. Aweber’s approach of putting the human face or touch to using autoresponders puts them a cut above the rest.
April 7th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Hi Marc,
Excellent point.
I have such a message in my sequence for more than a year now and my experience is that people who respond to this message are a lot more likely to make a purchase. In fact, the majority of my total sales volume is from people who responded to that message. So the time answering replies to that message is very well invested.
My message is a little bit different than just asking for questions. I rather ask them how my product is working for them (there is a free evaluation trial, so they have a chance to try it out). This kind of message also is a great way to communicate that I am serious about delivering great value to my customers and that I care about them.
Of course I also direct them to my FAQ, because it helps them to get some their questions answered faster and reduces my workload, so creates a win-win situation.
Also, the feedback I get from the replies to that message helps me a lot with the further development of my business and my product in a way which is aligned with the market.
So, anybody who reads this, by all means, go for it and add a message which encourages feedback from your customers. You will see the result in your bottomline.
July 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am
[…] If you’re making it a point to subscribe customers to your email campaign, you have an excellent way to connect with them and obtain quality feedback. Add a message to be sent automatically to subscribers, asking them for input on their experience. Even if they don’t respond, you’ve added a personal touch to your campaign. […]
November 30th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
That’s an excellent suggestion about feedback.
It can be very valuable.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:26 am
[…] Consider tactics like tracking clicks and opens, soliciting feedback, and integrating with a web analytics package to gather information. Then, form some conclusions and split test different strategies to see what works best. […]
February 7th, 2008 at 9:50 am
[…] To improve your email, you don’t want to hear just from those who are on their way out the door. If you have the resources to answer some emails here and there, there are clear benefits to proactively soliciting feedback from your subscribers. Email Reports […]
February 15th, 2008 at 7:26 am
this is an excellent technique I was using already as part of my signature, but I will try with a specific message. thanks!