Autoresponder
Features:
(All
of these features are available in the Basic and
Pro packages.)
Unlimited Autoresponders
Numerous Ways to Trigger
Messages Formatted as Text
or HTML
Personalize Messages
Unsubscribe Upon
Subscribe
Autoresponder
Reports
Questionnaire Form
Join Our Mailing
List Form
Tell A Friend Form
Custom Forms
Broadcasting
Mass Subscribing
Send Newsletters
Custom Fields
Unlimited
Autoresponders
What are autoresponders? If you've read anything about
Internet marketing, you have almost certainly heard of
them, though just what an autoresponder is and should
be varies according to who you talk to. Basically,
an autoresponder is an automated email program that responds
to emails automatically (hence the name). Like
so many of our features, Professional Cart Solutions
goes beyond the traditional definition. Unlike
other services, Professional Cart Solutions offers you
unlimited email
response messages! Furthermore, you can have an
unlimited number of autoresponder series for different
purposes. For example, you might have a few different
autoresponder series for client prospects to get more
information on your products, one for all your customers,
and a couple for customers who purchase a particular
product so you can follow up for repeat sales in the
future. You can train your affiliates, or even
offer classes with the lessons delivered by autoresponder
emails once per week (thus making the autoresponder messages
the product itself!). Simply put, autoresponders
can be the single most powerful tool for enhancing your
Internet business and Professional Cart Solutions gives
you unlimited access. It is cliché, but you could
easily spend twice what we charge for the entire Pro
package on another autoresponder system alone, and we
include it with either the Basic or Pro packages.
An autoresponder can be composed of one or more messages (as many as you like),
set to go out over a period of time. Each message has a "Days Delay" field,
telling the system how long it should wait after this message is sent to send
out the next message to your client. The autoresponders are timed for each
client according to when the client "subscribed" to the autoresponder;
that is, when the client triggered the autoresponder to go out in one way or
another. So for one autoresponder, when clients sign up they all get the
first message right away, no matter what the date is when they sign up. They
might all get the second message in the autoresponder series 3 days after they
subscribed, and the next one 7 days later, and so on. The timing is set
according to when they signed up, not according to any particular date or time.
Go to top
Numerous
Ways to Trigger
Autoresponders can be triggered in many ways. The can
go out by:
- Sending a direct email to the autoresponder
email address. Like the Buy Me URLs for
the shopping cart, Professional Cart Solutions
generates unique email addresses for each autoresponder
series you set up. You can have your clients
send an email directly to that email address to
subscribe to the autoresponder series (also, by
default you will get a copy of the email they sent). The
client would get the autoresponder messages as
if you had someone there sending them out by hand
every day.
- Submitting a form, such as your Questionnaire
Form or Join
Our Mailing List Form, or even your Custom
Form. System-generated forms such as the Questionnaire
or Join Our List both have default autoresponder
options, and with Custom Forms you can have a
single form subscribe a client to multiple autoresponder
series.
- Making a purchase through your shopping cart. You
can select an autoresponder to go out for every approved
transaction (it does not go out for declined transactions). If
you do nothing else with autoresponders, do use it
for this purpose. Follow-up messages to established
customers will generate your real profits. Set
this one up first!
- Purchasing a particular item through your shopping
cart. You can select an autoresponder
to go out when a particular item is purchased. Like
the shopping cart default autoresponder, this autoresponder
only goes out when the order is approved. If
you want to make sure the customer doesn't get
both a product-specific autoresponder and the default
autoresponder for the cart, you can use the Unsubscribe
Upon Subscribe feature. You could use this
feature to make the autoresponder the product itself
- for example if you offer a class delivered by
email, students would use the shopping cart to
register and pay for the class, and the autoresponder
would deliver the lessons automatically.
- Joining your Affiliates Program can trigger
a custom autoresponder just for your affiliates. This
autoresponder can include customized instructions
for your affiliates, or even training on how to market
and sell your product or service. Affiliates
are gold for e-commerce - you can use the autoresponder
to maintain interest in your products and contact
with you.
- Manually adding email addresses and subscribing
them to an autoresponder. You can subscribe
any or all of your clients to an autoresponder
series from within your account on Professional
Cart Solutions. Or, if you have a pre-existing
opt-in mailing list, you can upload it to Professional
Cart Solutions and subscribe the entire group to
an autoresponder.
Go to top
Messages Formatted as
Text or HTML
Messages can be created in either text or HTML
formats.
Go to top
Personalize Messages
You can create a more "personal" autoresponder message for your clients. You
can include their name, address, and anything else that appears in their individual
client record in your autoresponder messages.
Go to top
Unsubscribe Upon
Subscribe
Autoresponders a great tool, but you don't want
to overuse them - your clients will begin opting-out
of your list quite quickly if you deluge them with emails,
no matter how informative and valuable the information
is that they contain. Thus, you can use this feature
to help ensure that you don't do that. For example,
if you have an autoresponder set to go out for every
order as well as some product-specific autoresponders,
you might set those product-specific autoresponders to
unsubscribe the customer from the default cart autoresponder.
You might also have an affiliate autoresponder set to
unsubscribe your new affiliate signups from receiving
an autoresponder aimed at recruiting new affiliates.
Go to top
Autoresponder Reports
Autoresponder Reports allow you to track the
autoresponder in much the same way you would use the
Ad
Tracker feature. You can get a list of
all the subscriptions, remove requests, and a breakdown
of the days the requests were made - so you can focus
your ads more, collate it with order records, etc. You
can click on the dates to get a list of clients who subscribed
for that day (not including any who unsubscribed). This
is another feature offered by Professional Cart Solutions
that goes well beyond what other companies have to offer.
Go to top
Questionnaire Form
Now you can start using opt-in forms without
knowing a lick about form handlers or cgi. Just
choose the fields you want to have the prospective client
fill in, and the system will give you a URL to link your
site with the questionnaire form. This form can
include fields for name, address, phone numbers, and
so on, as well as up to 10
Custom
Fields with questions of your own choosing. When
a customer fills out and submits your form, the results
get stored in your clients database, and they get (if
you so choose) subscribed to an autoresponder. The
autoresponder can use any of the fields used in the questionnaire
to make a more personalized message. Additionally,
you can use your questionnaire form in a secure format,
using the same 128-bit encryption used for your order
form on the shopping cart.
Go to top
Join Our Mailing
List Form
Professional Cart Solutions also gives you another smaller form called the Join
Our Mailing List form that you can either link to or cut-and-paste the HTML into
your website. This can be used right on your front page of your website,
or anywhere you would like to give your site visitors the opportunity to get
onto your mailing list. We recommend you use this for a newsletter, but
there are many uses for a small, insertable form that links directly with your
clients database on Professional Cart Solutions.
Go to top
Tell A Friend Form
Word-of-mouth advertising is by far the best kind of exposure your business can
get. No advertisement carries the weight that a recommendation from a friend
carries. Professional Cart Solutions takes advantage of automation to give
your site visitors a way to recommend your website to their friends with a direct
email - the web equivalent of "word-of-mouth." The form uses
your
Customized
Look and Feel, asks the site visitor for their name and email address,
and offers a table to enter up to 10 names and email addresses of the visitor's
friends. These names and email addresses are NOT added to your clients
database - this is in effect a direct email from the person recommending your
site to their friends. However, the person using the form is added to your
database as a special sort of affiliate. They will not receive your regular affiliate
instructions, but will remain as "latent" affiliates. When they
get their first referral, they will likely be eager to claim their commission. You
can then inform them on how to login to their account (via an autoresponder,
if you like). The idea here is that they will then be motivated to make
more recommendations to other friends! Professional Cart Solutions also
features a similar, but separate, form that only your Affiliates can use. They
simply login to their affiliate account to access it. See
Affiliate
Module Features for details on this.
Go to top
Custom Forms
If you feel confident working with HTML to create
your own forms, Professional Cart Solutions allows you
to do that as well! You can design your own forms,
with the results posted to your clients database and
the client getting an autoresponder, just like with the
questionnaire form. A big advantage to this method
is that you can further control the client responses
with pull-down menus, radio buttons and the like.
Go to top
Broadcasting
Broadcasting in the context of e-commerce is sending out a mass emailing to your
clients. Historically, the only way to do this was with a proper email
application, but now you can use Professional Cart Solutions to do it for you
(and without using up your own bandwidth). A broadcast email goes out to
everyone on the target list at the same time, making it ideal for offering special
sales or coupons, making important announcements, and so on. You can do
a broadcast with just a few clicks. Broadcasts can be personalized as with
an autoresponder.
Go to top
Mass Subscribing
You can also create a new autoresponder and mass subscribe some or all of your
clients to that autoresponder. This amounts to a broadcast with automatic
follow-ups.
Go to top
Send Newsletters
One of the best ways to get your site visitors to opt-in to your mailing list
is to offer a periodic (weekly, monthly, etc) informative newsletter. This
is a great way to build trust and respect among your prospective and existing
customers, as well as a direct avenue to their inbox for advertising your business!
The easiest way to do a newsletter is with a combination of an
Autoresponder and
Broadcasting. Have
a sign up form (such as the
Join Our Mailing
List Form) set to subscribe to a particular autoresponder. You
might call this autoresponder "Newsletter Welcome" or something to
that effect. That autoresponder will thank the client for subscribing,
and perhaps give them a sample of what they can expect to receive in the regular
newsletter, or perhaps links to past weeks' newsletters. Then, each week
(or month, or year, or whatever) go to the broadcast link in your account, and
select that "Newsletter Welcome" autoresponder. Then you can
paste in your newsletter on the broadcast page and send it out, using text or
HTML.
Go to top
Custom Fields
With your Basic or Pro package account on Professional Cart Solutions, you also
have 10 custom fields. These are database fields that you can customize. They
are part of the individual record for each of the clients in your clients database
on Professional Cart Solutions. You can have questions in your
Questionnaire
Form, on your shopping cart Order Form, or on your Custom Forms. The
10 fields remain constant for all client records, and you can select which custom
field questions should show up on your order form, which ones on your questionnaire,
and so on.
And of course, when you download your clients database, all of the custom fields
are included in the download. You can also search 9 of these fields with
the Manage Clients search form. The 10th field is not searchable, because
while the first 9 fields are limited to 50 characters, the 10th field is limited
to 100 lines of text - ample room for your clients to give you an extended answer
to any questions you like. The other extremely useful feature of custom
fields is that you can use them in your autoresponders or broadcasts. Even
field 10!
Go to top
