The simple mistake that has cost me thousands of $$$$'s (or ££££'s!)

• By: admin on Jul 17th, 2003
• Internet Marketing

I am going to share something with you this week.  It is a mistake that I made a couple of years ago when I first started building my website businesses.  It is a mistake that I have known about for over 18 months but one that I just ‘couldn’t find the time’ to put right (sound familiar?).  It is a mistake that I have now corrected and which has cost me thousands of dollars (or pounds) in lost sales.  I am going to share that mistake with you in the hope that you don’t make the same one…

About 2 years ago I remember reading a similar article to the one I am about to write.  I took a bit of notice, but not enough.  The article was about ‘sequential autoresponders’.  For those of you that don’t know, a sequential autoresponder is a piece of software used to send out emails.  For example, let’s say you subscribe to a newsletter.  You get an immediate email thanking you for your subscription and then the next day you get another email maybe suggesting that you join the websites forum.  Two days later you get another one offering you a discount on a new product and a week later you get another one which tells you about another product or site.  Get the idea?

The autoresponder software sends these emails out automatically, with no work required from the site owner.  Because of the way that the emails can be used to build trust and get subscribers coming back to the original website, autoresponders are pretty much guaranteed to increase sales.

Back to my story.  After reading the article a couple of years ago, I stuck an autoresponder on one of my sites.  I kept an eye on results for a week or so and didn’t see any difference in sales, so I took it off.  Looking back, the reason that it didn’t work was because I was hardly getting any traffic at the time and my follow-up messages were all wrong.

As my portfolio of websites grew, I always had this little voice in the back of my mind telling me that I should be using autoresponders, but because I now had so many web pages across so many sites, it would be a mammoth task to implement a new piece of autoresponder software, so I just kept putting it off.

Anyway, last month I bit the bullet and installed sequential autoresponders across 5 of my websites.  This meant changes to over 100 different web pages and also meant I had to write 15 sets of email messages (over 70 different individual emails!).  It took me just over 3 weeks of pretty much solid work.

BUT these changes have caused an increase in sales this month of over 20%!!  Just by using follow-up emails!  And that’s based on the first emails I have typed out – after a few weeks of testing and altering content etc, I reckon this figure could rise to as much as 30% or even 40%!

I have missed out on this additional income in a massive way over the past two years – do not make the same mistake!  Start using sequential autoresponders on your website today, even if it doesn’t seem like they are of much benefit.  It is far easier to get something like this installed on your site from day one, than to do what I did and try and implement it 2 years down the road.

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