A personal confession:
I’m a compulsive salad buyer. I buy those prewashed and precut bags of mixed greens, and I stack them in my fridge. I eat them too, but not at the speed that I buy them at.
This often means that, like this morning, I’ll peek into an already opened bag of salad and evaluate critically whether it’s too wilted to consume. Meanwhile, other, perfectly fresh, new bags of salad sit in my fridge, waiting until they too become old enough and unfresh enough to deserve my attention.
Do you maybe sense an analogy in the making? Something to do with marketing? Well, here goes:
On last week’s Write & Profit coaching call, I asked one question to three of the five people who are in that group. The question was:
”What’s the strategy behind your autoresponder?”
There are good reasons to have an email autoresponder. And then there are bad reasons.
One bad reason is, “Everybody says I should.” Another bad reason is, “Because it’s a functionality of my ESP.”
Here are a few of the problems I saw with the autoresponders among my coaching students:
#1. They were out of date. They did not represent the current philosophy or positioning or main offers of the person writing.
#2. They were not as good as their more recent emails.
#3. They did not feel fresh or real, because they were not fresh or real.
#4. They did not allow new subscribers to get to the most current and exciting offers.
If you have nothing else to eat in your fridge but wilted salad, then that makes your choice of dinner easier.
Likewise, if you don’t write fresh emails, then having a stale autoresponder is better than sending no emails at all.
On the other hand, if you are writing fresh emails, then you need to have good reasons for also having an autoresponder.
And in the absence of such good reasons, it’s better to just throw the old salad, I mean old emails, out, and serve up what’s fresh and new.
Fresh and new is not hard to do. And if you want my recipe book for fresh emails, on demand, take a look here: