In previous posts I’ve talked about the importance of building your mailing list. Now let’s consider how to use your permission list effectively for promoting and marketing your ADR services with the help of an autoresponse system.
Quality Content Is Key
The most effective use of your autoresponder is to distribute quality information that educates about ADR, builds trust and relationship with you, and keeps you fresh in prospects’ minds without inundating them.
I’m of a mind that the best way to promote ADR is to educate about ADR and differentiate yourself by market niche. People who visit your website are probably there because they have a problem they need to solve. If they’re like many members of the public, they know little about mediation and other ADR and want to understand how it can help them solve their problem. They are probably not sure that ADR is helpful to them and may be skeptical or downright curmudgeonly, depending on what they’ve heard from others and the media.
Marketing ADR Using Autoresponders
We live in the era of the skeptical consumer, wary of being manipulated by advertising and leery of an overly promotional “buy me” approach. I believe strongly that you will create better relationships with prospective clients by being a reliable source of sound information than by being “sales-y.” Ways you can use autoresponders to be a resource and conduit include:
- Sending out regular or periodic information to subscribers. You can do this by creating a series of pre-written emails that are distributed at designated intervals, distributing your blog’s posts by autoresponder for those who don’t use feed aggregators, or distributing information in newsletter form.
- Reminding prospects of ways they can benefit from your services via a sequential email marketing campaign.
- Following up with former clients, sending information that can benefit them post-mediation—a value-added service.
- Inviting feedback from your mailing list. What would they like to learn more about? Do they want more or less contact from you? Is there a service you could offer that would be of interest to them?
With a good autoresponder, you get access to metrics that tell you what’s working and what’s not: number of click-throughs from an email to your website, number of receivers who opened your message, results of “split-testing” different sign-up boxes to see which works most effectively, which kinds of messages result in interest from which client niches. It’s powerful information that helps you adjust your marketing for better results.
Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
