Category: Email Marketing

We’ve been getting quite a few newbie email marketers coming into RocketResponder that have this thought that the larger their list, the better their results will be. But they are actually finding the opposite is happening.

The phenomenon actually happens because most smaller lists have a more personal approach to them. It’s true that you can be personal with a larger list, but when it’s small it tends to be a small list of people you have a stronger relationship with.

Another way to think of it is this..  If you talk to 10 people every day, how long will you talk to them for? Now if you have 100 people every day, that time shrinks. At some point when your list size gets too big you can’t keep up with the personal level.

This isn’t a reason to stop building your list, but it’s why you shouldn’t sweat having a small list now. Take the time to interact with that list in a way you couldn’t if you had a larger list. You can ask them questions and have them reply to the email, for instance.

With List Automation on RocketResponder, you can do some really neat stuff. I’m sure someone else will come up with better ideas, but to get your brain juices started here’s what I like about List Automation!

But wait..  What is it? Oh yeah, List Automation allows you to “chain” lists so when a user gets added to one list, they can be added or removed from other lists at the same time. Which if you get creative, you can do some really cool things.

For instance.. You could have a list of people who haven’t purchased anything, and a list of people who have purchased something. When they are added to the purchased something list, you can have them automatically removed from the haven’t purchased anything list.

Or maybe you have a blog, and you want to entice people to subscribe to your blog in different ways. You could setup a list for your blog notifications, and another list for each of the freebies you give out. Then setup list automation to add them to the notification list when they are added to any of the other lists.

You see where I’m going here. What’s useful to know, they won’t have to confirm every action. As far as we’re concerned once you’ve double opt-ed in a subscriber you can add/remove them from other lists as you need. But of course if they unsubscribe from all your lists you’ll need to double opt in again to get that permission back.

I was visiting a local store whose business owner I know, and we got to talking about email. They use email at their store to drum up more business when new products come in or when business is slow.

One of the really cool things was they showed me their stats. And they did something interesting. Every time they emailed their customers, they sent up a follow up email to everyone that didn’t open the first email.

For most people that sounds really cool, but they don’t know how to do that. So obviously I added it to RocketResponder right away! When you go to send your broadcast, you’ll now see this option:

Now, this comes with a warning. If you already send emails daily, I wouldn’t use it. But if you send a monthly newsletter or have a really important email, definitely go for it. We don’t place internal limits on how often you can use it, but you don’t want to upset your customers!

This type of feature is available at other email providers, so don’t think I’m trying to say we invented something awesome. But I can say we charge way less than other email providers, while providing big deal features like this. In fact, we only charge $20 per month! How much are you paying?

You might be thinkings..  Whaaat!? Why would I unsubscribe someone!? Well there are two reasons: 1) they asked to be removed or 2) they have an annoying vacation or auto reply message that floods your inbox every time you send an email.

Now with Zapier you can create an Unsubscribe label withing Gmail. Anytime you label an email Unsubscribe, it will automatically remove the person from your list! I am using it for my blog notifications list, and it’s great. For some reason people like to reply and ask to unsubscribe rather than click the link. So now in one click I can honor that request!

BONUS: Now that Zapier has published our RocketResponder apps as public, I can setup shared Zaps. So if you click here you can setup your label in easy steps, rather than manually doing it ;-)

One of the most powerful ways to get more out of your membership sites is to utilize email. Whether it’s a traffic exchange, a service, or any kind of website where people can pay or upgrade, email is a crazy awesome tool.

Now some people do this really great, and others are missing the power behind using an autoresponder like RocketResponder. Almost everyone understands that sending out email newsletters is powerful. That one is easy, but here’s the super cool thing you should be doing..

Use the followups feature! Now you’re gonna read this and think wow it’s so simple yet I get it. But we use this with Trck.me and RocketResponder heavily.

When people join we give them a 30 day free trial, so we immediately start sending them a follow up series. And the whole point is to get them to convert over to a paid customer. Now we don’t email them every day, but often enough to remind them that we still exist and they still aren’t a paid customer.

The end result is more people convert from being a paid member to being an upgraded member. What’s even better is we use the RocketResponder API to automatically unsubscribe them from that list the moment they upgrade. Then we use it to subscribe them to our paying members list, where we can give them tips on how to use their membership to get the most out of it.

This can be used in any kind of membership site, especially when there is a free trial or a free tier. If you want to get really fancy, we also move them over to a list if their account expires, to remind them that they need to update billing.

It works great..  In fact services I’ve used that use the same tactic have gotten me to pay because I tend to miss emails. Sometimes I even see the email but it just takes a few reminders before I have the time to get to it. The key is the emails kept coming until I did it.

The fun part..  We charge $20/mo for unlimited subscribers. So as you come up with creative ways to make new series, you don’t have to worry about your costs going up. Other services charge based on list size, and every new list – even if there are duplicates – counts towards your total fee. But not with us ;-)