This document discusses problems with chained autoresponders and provides suggestions for improvement. The three main problems are: 1) messages that only sell with no useful content, 2) messages with too little useful content and mostly teasers, and 3) messages that are too long with reams of content in each message. Suggestions include keeping messages short, focused on the product, and spaced out over multiple days to avoid inundating subscribers. Marketers should test autoresponders on themselves to improve effectiveness from the subscriber's perspective.

1. Do Your Autoresponders Drive
Your Customers Crazy?

2. Writing chained auto-responder messages to sell a
product is a good idea in principle, but in practice it can
LOSE you clients just as well if you don't get right.

3. A chained auto-responder is a sequence of emails that
gets delivered automatically when someone subscribes to
this autoresponder.

4. It is used in marketing to deliver mini-advertisements,
teaser courses, demo extracts, testimonials or stepped
sales letters, and all of this is designed to get the client
eventually to click on the "buy me now" link for the main
product that is being promoted.

5. There are three main problems with chained auto-
responders. Avoid these, TEST your linked auto-responders
before you inflict them on the general public, and you
should see significant increases in your sales.

6. Problem No. 1 - No Content Beyond Selling

7. This is THE most VIOLENTLY annoying class of chained
autoresponders - message after message from the same
place, trying to sell you something, in so many different
words. YUCK!

8. What marketers who don't THINK seem to forget is that
folk who own and manage PCs and email aren't that
stupid.

9. They can read and write, you know, and they are not
IDIOTS.

10. After two or three repeats, they will immediately delete
such messages from their inbox and probably put a spam
block on the sender domain for good measure.

11. That's not what the marketeer had in mind, I should wager
...

12. Problem No. 2 - Too Little Content

13. I remember one "mini course" which contained nothing
but teasers and virtually no useful information
whatsoever.

14. Once again, look, marketeers!

15. If you want people to "try" the product, you need to give
them at least a little taste of it.

16. Don't hold the glass with the sample wine under their
nose, and when they reach out, oops, that'll be $875
dollars please ... but we do have a "money back"
guarantee ...

17. This is just ANNOYING, it's even dishonourable and an
angry person does not make a good customer.

18. Problem No. 3 - Too Much, Way Too Much ...

19. I subscribed to another auto-responder teaser mini course
just a few days ago, and here, the folks in charge had done
a 180' U-turn on the two points above, most likely because
they got it that those content less/content poor efforts
don't work to sell more of their product.

20. In their desire to have it be known how marvellously
content packed the main item was, they created this huge
long document, of at least 20, 25 paragraphs for the first
instalment of their chained auto-responder.

21. Gee.

22. Now I don't know about the rest of the planet, but I'm
actually quite a busy person and I get STACKS of emails
every day.

23. I try and cut down the time I spent on dealing with email
because it does get out of hand, and on this occasion I was
into something else anyway.

24. I took just *one look* at the plethora of writing and went,
"Oh god, I don't have time for that right now ..." and left
it.

25. Have you ever left a non-priority email for later ...?

26. Yeah, you know what I mean.

27. But then, the very next day, the 2nd instalment arrived. I
opened it and damn me, there's another REAM of
goodness knows what, but now I've missed the boat
because this is No. 2 and I haven't read No. 1 yet!

28. I hastily closed it, feeling guilty and moved on.

29. But then, No. 3 arrived - another book length instalment. I
just couldn't handle it anymore.

31. Now that's a terrible shame because there may have been
valuable information I never got, and the guys who wrote
this spend AGES doing it.

32. So, here are my suggestion for chained auto-responders
copy.

33. 1. Head it with, "Busy? Save me! I contain important
information!" or words to that effect.

34. 2. Keep it SHORT. Pick out ONE USEFUL thing and just - tell
me THAT. So I can glance at it and say, "Hey, that's useful!
Cool! Thanks, guys!" When I mean short, I mean anything
above three paragraphs is way, way too long for an
autoresponder email in this day and age.

35. 3. Keep it TOTALLY FOCUSSED on the product you are
selling. I'm on autoresponders where you wouldn't begin
to guess for all the waffle, testimonials, side tracks and
"personal messages" what I'm supposed to be BUYING at
the end of the day!

36. 4. Give people a chance to keep up. Space your messages
three days, don't inundate us. Or better still, test this for
yourself. One hell of a lot of "internet marketing wisdom"
is completely out of date now because it was researched
back in the days when we got four emails a week, and not
fourteen thousand each. Time has moved on and requires
NEW thinking, and different strategies.

37. My last tip on chained autoresponders is as follows.

38. Subscribe yourself to OTHER PEOPLE'S efforts.

39. Don't look at them as a marketeer would, but as though
you were a human being in front of their computer, if you
know what I mean by that.

40. You can learn what pleases and what works, and what
doesn't.

41. Mark out to yourself what you like and use this in your
own efforts, and avoid what really turns you off.

42. Lastly, keep working at your chained autoresponder copy
until you have something that really works, and really
brings in lots more sales.

43. They are a great resource - if handle them right.

44. Please visit:
http://bestitjobsforthefuture.com/form.php?id=1036
for more info