It's amazing how ignorant business people are to the powerful online tools that are available to everyone for pennies a day. One of those tools is the autoresponder. People tend to think an autoresponder is some kind of e-mail script you turn on when you go on vacation to let people know you're out of the office. Actually, an autoresponder is a catch-all term for an online program which collects information about who is visiting your site and initiates a subsequent action. This can be used to send follow-up e-mails to customers, visitors to your site, or to act like an usher at a movie theatre, where a name and e-mail is collected before granting access to a download or promotion. Aweber is probably the undisputed leader in the autoresponder world.
Youtube is full of great tutorials on how to use aweber's tools and strategies on how to use an autoresponder in your site. Even the aweber.com site is full of great information on what works and what doesn't in online marketing. The strategy I am currently looking at is to place the autoresponder between visitors and a free download promotion as well as the check-out page for paid downloads. The idea is that even if you don't get a click-though (online sale) by getting visitors to opt-in for future freebies, you'll eventually sell them on something in the future. Remember, it's all about reach and frequency, and the autoresponder is the most amazing tool ever invented for reaching qualified leads cheaply and easily.
Facebook's version of the autoresponder is the fan page. When you create a new commercial page on Facebook, you can ask people to "like" your page in order to grant them access to the fan page. The fan page can contain coupons, information or any type of intellectual property. Collecting "likes" is very much the same as building a list using an autoresponder. Fan pages can also have autoresponders added to build lists and get visitors to take advantage of further offers made on your fan page.
As I see it, the new culture of advertising and marketing seems to be evolving into a breadcrumb strategy; offer people free stuff to get their attention and up-sell them incrementally in easy stages until they discover they are utterly broke. Seriously, this is not far from the truth, and when done properly is neither offensive nor sneaky. In fact, a good marketing plan attached to a good product will always use an autoresponder and in the end, will make both seller and buyer very happy campers.
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