So when is  the “best” time to send your email messages by autoresponders ?

• Deliver themselves only during the days and times you want.
• Avoid days and times that don’t work for your subscribers.

Throughout most of the history of email marketing, this sort of focused delivery scheduling was only available for broadcasting – not for autoresponders.

That’s about to change. To learn how, watch this video or read on.

Send Windows Make Your Autoresponders Smarter

Today, we’re excited to announce that you can deliver your automated follow up messages during the days and times you’ve determined to be best for your subscribers.

To see Autoresponder Send Windows in action, watch the short video below:

As you can see, you can easily choose during which days, and times you want your autoresponders to go to your customers and prospects.

And when you opt to use the geographic awareness, we’ll automatically adjust delivery to each subscriber’s time zone – no matter where they are in the world, if you tell us to deliver your follow up in the morning, that’s when we’ll send it to each person!

How Can You Use This To Make Your Email Marketing More Effective?

A few ideas:

• Look at when subscribers are opening your emails and/or clicking your links (the Opens over Time and Clicks Over Time reports will show you this) and adjust your send windows so your messages stand out at the top of the inbox during those times!
• Run a weekend sale – schedule one of your follow ups to only send on Friday mornings!
• Are there certain days and/or times that you know are bad for your subscribers? Use send windows to avoid sending during those days/times!

Learn More About Autoresponder Send Windows

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How to Double Your Sales with Backend Selling and Up Selling

The prime purpose of any business, whether online or concrete, is to make and close a deal or a sale, by taking money for a product or service which we provide, and thereby gaining revenue….it’s like I learned in my MBA program “No business makes a profit until something is sold”!

While engaged in business, you should always try to get newer people to buy from you, so that your customer base builds up.

It is also essential that you keep your existing customer base happy so that they keep returning to you. A returning customer is generally a happy customer and making him return over and over again is termed back end selling….and they are FAR more cheaper to earn sales from than creating a new buyer!

Along with back end selling, where people who have previously purchased from you or have used your services return to you for a repeat purchase, it is also important to promote up selling.

Up selling occurs when a customer who has returned to you, comes back for not only the earlier products but more that that, thus effectively have a sale value greater than the last time he or she visited. This reflects that the customer is happy with your products and services over and above that of your competitors.

The lions share of your sales and profits are going to come from a section of your customers which is quite small. It is this small group of people that you need to keep happy and therefore returning to your website.

To make this easy and automated, you need a system (contact me if you’d like to discuss how I can help you in your business! Just make a comment below and we’ll connect)

You also need to pitch hard and ensure that people enjoy shopping on your web site and leave wanting more, in order to bring over people from being casual customers into the group of people who are your primary profit drivers. You want these people to come back over and over again and not go elsewhere, so you need to ensure that the old adage of “the customer is always right” is followed to the maximum, and these prime customers are kept happy.

The next step, after ensuring that your customers are returning, is to get them to buy more than what they were planning to buy. When they are finalizing a sale, offer them some other product along with their chosen product at a discounted rate or a product which compliments the one that they have chosen. This is somewhat similar to what happens when you go to a fast food joint and you are asked if you want fries with your burger! Or “would you like me to super-size that for you”. Over 30% of the time they say yes and that is pure profit!

So, basically you should always try to convince your customers to buy more than what they were planning on doing and then watch your profits soar. Yet just because you are up selling doesn’t mean that you should ignore the needs and requirements of your customers.

Up selling is a tool which should be used for the benefit of both you and your customer and never to their disadvantage as if a customer feels that he was coerced into buying something, he might not return the next time. All sales should always be beneficial to both the buyer and the seller ad never o only one side.

Back end selling and up selling are powerful tools at the disposal of any one into sales and you should use these tools to the best possible use that you can.

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Backend Sales and Email Marketing

You may have scored an early deal from your ecommerce website and want to step up your marketing initiatives to drive home the advantage, and expand the base with more new customers.

Now, while it is indeed desirable to keep a lookout for new opportunities to grab customers, you must take care that you don’t lose your old customers who have actually expressed faith in you and your product by purchasing it. With email marketing you can secure for yourself backend sales numbers without too much new investment on advertising.

But you may ask, how can one expect email marketing to be effective, given the pervasive antagonism amongst email users towards spam? The answer is simple—what is called opt-in emails in marketing jargon. In this variant of email marketing, the person gives you permission to send you advertising emails.

One simple way to secure this permission for your website is to offer some kind of freebies. Ebooks are known to be popular. But it is advisable that you give something that is related and relevant to your ecommerce website. You could offer one of your cheaper products, which would not only be more appreciated but also a sort of promotion for your brand.

One thing to keep in mind is that you should desist from sending direct product advertisements as many people don’t like being advertised to. What you should do is develop interest through interesting write-ups that will give some background information about your product. You should develop an e-newsletter that can be sent to customers.

You must prepare enough material for a 7-day advertising cycle so that you don’t let the customer slip away, while at the same time not boring him or her with repeat content. You may also wish to utilize an autoresponder service in case you have a very long mailing list.

Email autoresponders, apart from making things more convenient for you, also reduce chances that you will be hauled up for spamming. Paid email autoresponders are known to be more effective than the free ones, and also don’t require you to carry another company’s advertising on your autoresponder as is the case with a free service.

So, the crux of the matter is that in your rush to get more, new customers you should never neglect your old patrons. If you have a useful, reliable product, it is these older customers that will bring you more gains, as they have tested your product and are happy with it.

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How to Increase Backend Sales from Your Current Customers

If you are selling a product that is giving you very good profits at the front end, but are making very little or nothing at all from your backend operations, you could actually be letting go of a golden opportunity to make money.

Many smart entrepreneurs out there are actually making a fortune for themselves by catering to the needs of customers for backend products. The top of this list is dominated by information products and some kinds of software applications.

But before we start the discussion, what are backend sales? The frontend sale is the main product you have on offer. Thus, the backend sales are other products that you are able to sell to the customer along with this frontend product.

This is how it works: if a customer has purchased a product on your website and clicks a link to download her product, you can send them thought o another page that makes a ‘one-time offer’ to the customer before they go ahead to their main download page.

There are, in fact, a number of ways to increase your backend sales so that you make more profit. Backend sales are important and in one sense easier because the customer is already buying a product and is in a purchase-friendly mindset to start with, which makes it easier to sell him anything.

This concept of backend sales will also have a bearing on how you develop your main product. You should develop a product that will encourage higher backend sales. While designing your frontend product you should know that you don’t necessarily make only one sale to a customer.

If someone likes your product, they will surely come back. At the same time, just having a backend product does not always mean that it will ring in the sales. The backend product must be related to the frontend you are selling.

One smart thing many businesses have discovered is to offer a small discount on the frontend product if the customer buys one of your backend products along with it. This is tempting to the customer for the savings it will mean, and also the convenience a complete package offers.

Finally, one thing that everyone must do for garnering higher backend profits is to capture the names and email addresses of your customer for follow-up later on. This might sound simple but many people actually neglect it, at their own cost.

So, what you basically need is a little creativity and some initiative to make your backend sales make you more money than you ever thought possible.

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Very eye-opening article I found!

Small businesses in the US will not cut spending on most forms of online advertising in 2009, judging by a survey conducted in December 2008 by Ad-ology Research. A higher percentage of respondents said they planned to spend “about the same” in 2009 than planned to change their spending.

More small businesses said they would increase their spending on social networking than on any other format. And respondents were more likely to say they would increase spending in 2009 on e-mail and their company Websites than make cuts on those formats.

The percentage of small businesses who said they did not use various online marketing tactics was high. Well over one-third of respondents said they did not market using social networks, their own Website or even e-mail. 

A lot of small businesses’ marketing efforts this year will focus on lead generation, according to a study conducted in December 2008 by Issues and Answers for the Yellow Pages Association (YPA). More than one-half of responding small-business owners named lead generation as their greatest challenge. Nearly one out of five said lack of ad dollars was the toughest marketing problem they faced. Many respondents said that ROI was the main way they measured success for their marketing tactics

Bottom Line?

Small Business Owners need to install cutting edge marketing tools and systems to reduce their non-productive advertising and increase and ROI.

source:http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006847

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