Since you are reading this post, you have probably heard the favourite sentence of all marketing gurus:

“Money is in the list”.

The first time we heard it (Me & Tib) was during a seminar on online marketing and to be frank, we did not quite understand it. Our tip – translate the word ‘list’ into a more traditional ‘data base’ and you will probably understand quicker if you are like us – from the traditional marketing school.

I wondered then why would a database be so important. I have studied the topic since and I came up with a simple analogy that clearly illustrates the need for a list, or data base.

Imagine now that you have a product to sell – say Swiss cheese (or eBook, or affiliate link, or other product more relevant to your field – it really doesn’t matter at this point). Let’s say that the Swiss cheese you offer is a premium quality product and all of your friends love it. Selling Swiss cheese to a group of friends can make a great business … if you have thousands of friends. But what if you only have a few? (don’t worry, we like you J). Your possibilities to sell the product are significantly diminished. Do you agree?

Purely for the case study purpose, imagine you had a thousand friends, maybe even two thousand, and you found an easy way to inform them all about your new product – Swiss Cheese. Thousands of potential customers instead of two?!  Wouldn’t that be great? Think about it. Even if say only one percent of your friends decide to come over and try your cheese, wouldn’t that be something to start with? Because of the friends database, you achieved 10-20 visitors coming over with an intention to buy cheese. Not to mention – you managed to get it all with no marketing budget, time consuming advertising campaigns and no time wasted.

You got 20 visitors just because you had an amazing database of friends. You managed to inform thousands of people of your new product within minutes. You may repeat this step as many times as you like –offering your products, services or knowledge to people who gave you their contact details.

This quick example shows clearly how important it is to build your own customer , or as we prefer, friends database. You simply have a chance to present your product or service to highly targeted group of potential customers at your fingertips. Building an extensive data  base, or list, may take some time (and it will), but it is an effort worth taking.

Once you started building your database, you need to think of another issue – how to contact your customers, or friends, in an easy, time efficient and cost effective way? This is almost as important as having a list. Because what  is the worth of the list if your customers simply don’t like you, don’t respect you and don’t buy your products? ZERO! You need to work on building a good relationship with your list. There are many techniques for that, but you may sum it up in two words: VALUABLE CONTENT.

You may ask: what is the best way to contact your list? Well, I would not recommend phone calls. Would you like people to call you at home? Home visits may not be such a good idea either (especially if you don’t quite like the feeling of the door smashing into your face). Sending an email would be an acceptable option for small lists. But emailing hundreds, or thousands of people may be a little time consuming. And this is where auto responders come in handy.

So what is auto responder?

An autoresponder is a computer program, web application, software tool or agent running on web servers, that automatically answers e-mails sent to you. Modern autoresponders offer multiple additional functions, such as sending newsletters, providing email authentication services and other  useful tools used to create and maintain a good relationship with your list.

Auto responders are not there only to answer emails sent to you. It is also a way to send newsletters, updates, freebies. It is basically like an auto pilot for your business. It limits the time you need to spend on your customer service to minimum. The art is – to create a system. The rest is history.