Passive Income. It is the holy grail of business.

I can tell you from personal experience, there is nothing quite like rolling out of bed at 5:30 in the morning while on vacation and seeing this text message:

(Thats $397.00 not $39,700)

How did I make $397.00 in my sleep? I worked my butt off.

But without email autoresponders it would have been impossible.

Today I’m going to teach you:

• What an Autoresponder is
• The anatomy of my most lucrative Autoresponder
• How I make money from them
• 5 other killer Autoresponder strategies

Buckle up.

1. What is an autoresponder?

It’s simple at its core, an autoresponder sends an email to someone on a pre-determined schedule.

Fill out this from. Send email.

Click this link. Send email.

They can get more complex by chaining emails together.

Example:

• Send an email
• Wait 3 days, then send another email.
• Wait 5 days, then send another email.

They can make you look like a genius and allow you to do things that would be impossible otherwise.

For instance: Neville has an autoresponder sequence at Kopywritingkourse.com. You fill in the form, letting him know you are interested, and 15 minutes later you get an email.

Do you think he personally wrote all 1,127 words of that email to you in the 15 minutes since you signed up? No.

Would it be feasible to write an email to every one of your new signups?

Perhaps you could have a template saved and everytime you notice a new sbscriber you could copy and paste it into a email, grab their address and hit send. That could work. If you only had a few subscribers per day.

But what if you had 20? 100? 500?

You would have to hire someone whose only job was sending welcome emails.

OR you could just setup an autoresponder to do all of that for you automatically.

2. Anatomy of my most lucrative Autoresponder

My site runs on autoresponders. Nearly every aspect of my business has one baked in. Let’s take a look at the most lucrative, my automated free course.

How it is setup (and the reason behind it)

The first step of using an autoresponder is getting your readers to give you an email address in exchange for something.

Displayed prominently in the right hand sidebar of my site is an opt-in form to my free video course.

The key to making this work is to choose a giveaway that is relevant to your site.

Example 1: If you run a local Crossfit gym and your giveaway is a free introductory lesson. That is relevant. People want that and will opt-in for it.

If you were to offer a free eBook on running marathons, it wouldn’t convert all that well due to it being less relevant to the reason they are on your site.

Example 2: My blogs #1 focus is teaching you how to grow your business with video.

The course I offer walks my readers through making an explainer video from scratch even if they suck at design and don’t know the first thing about video editing.

How well does it work?

Let’s jump into the numbers.

I get around 10,000 readers on my blog each month and of those , 45% are there for the first time. That means 4,500 new people are stopping in every 30 days.

Of those 4,500 new people, 7% decide to signup for the course.

That comes out to 315 new students each month.

With my autoresponder I’m able to deliver a series of 10 emails over 17 days to all 315 students without doing anything.

Here is the exact chain of events that unfolds when you enter your email:

The autoresponder handles collecting the address and then sending out and managing when to send the remainder of the emails. It is also smart enough to stagger the sending based on how much content my readers are consuming.

For instance: On Day 1 Students get a ‘Welcome’ email within 15 minutes of signing up. It contains a link to the first lesson. Then on Day 2 they are sent a survey quesiton. On Day 3 Lesson #2 is sent…and so on.

All of this happens automatically.

3: How to make money from an autoresponder

All of this is great but how do I make money?

I make money two different ways.

Method 1: Offer a Premium Product

I told you about my free auto-responder course already. What I didn’t say is that there is a paid course as well. At the end of the course I invite my best students to join a master class.

In the master class I go much more in-depth on the exact details of creating explainer videos. I put the camera over my shoulder and show every step of the process. I give out video templates, cheat sheets and have live Q&A sessions.

The free course is just under an hour long where as the paid course is 4+ hours of video instruction as well as tons of bonus material.

Having this model allows the most interested students to take their training up a notch while the others can use the free information guilt free. This builds my reputation and relationship with them and it allows me to more easily sell them products they are interested in at a later date.

I only ask people to buy from me who have previously expressed interest in my product.

In fact you can’t go to my site and find the master class for sale. It’s not there, you only get to buy if you go through my free course first.

This does 3 things:

1) Focuses all of my energy on giving: I never promote my paid course to new readers. I’ve found that my business grows more rapidly by focusing on giving rather than asking. By focusing all of my energy on giving and serving first, I’m able to ask for a sale on the backend and have a much higher chance of getting it.

2) Preserves my reputation: I am in the business of helping other people improve their business. Unfortuntely, there are alot of other people out there that do the same thing but in a scammy type of way (just go to jvzoo.com and you’ll know what I mean).

Someone brand new to my site can’t buy anything. All they can do is consume the free content that I’ve given them. If they happen into the correct autoresponder series, then they will get a chance to buy a premium product, course or coaching session.

3) Make them want it more: You know the best way to pickup a hot girl? Ignore her.

I get at least 5 emails a week from people begging to give me money for something. They want an explaienr video made, they want to buy my course or they want me to help implement a service into their business. This is because I don’t make it easy to buy from me. Counterintuitive? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.

Here are my numbers:

Out of every 88 students that go through my free course 1 of them will buy the paid course.

The paid course cost $397.00.

On average 315 people signup for my course each month, that works out to 4 sales every 4 weeks or $1,588 per month.

Knowing my numbers and relying on autoresponders to deliver the product makes my business a simple math formula.

More free course students = More paid course students

Mission: Get more free students!

Method 2: Service funnels

The second method I use to make money from autoresponders is selling services.

This is how it works:

Step 1. Write a how-to post on my blog.

Step 2. Offer a killer bonus at the end of the blog in exchange for an email address.

Step 3. Email everyone that gets the bonus a paid consultation to implement the “how-to” in their business

This funnel works extremely well. Most people have a hard time implementing strategies across different industries. So, If I give an example of how to use autoresonders in the internet marketing industry, someone that owns an electrical supply house in Wyoming is probably going to find it difficult to apply directly to heir business.

When I send them an email 4 days after they download my bonus and offer them a coaching session I am able to convert 2% of those people into $100 per hour coaching sessions.

Recently I’ve even evolved this into a monthly coaching subscription #recurringrevenue.

Pro Tip™: You can also use the data you collect from doing post specific opt-in bonuses to help create your next paid information product or tool by monitoring what bonuses attracted the most opt-ins.

Example: Here are my opt-in numbers for the past few blog post:

We can see from this that two bonuses out performed the others significantly. A few good questions to ask yourself when you notice trends like this are:

1. Are there any products I can make to help people implement this “how to”?

2. Can I create a product or course to go into more depth on this topic?

The answer to these question is exactly what your readers want from you. Give it to them and they’ll pay you for it.

4. Five different examples for using an autoresponder

1. Convert a free trail to paid: This happened to me last week. I signed up for a free trial of WordPress plugin. I installed it, played around with it and then promptly forgot all about it.

Then the trail expired and I recieved this message from them:

People get busy, little nudges like this can make a big difference in your conversion rates.

2. Deliver Bonuses: Hubspot has led the way in driving email subscriptions via bonus material. At the end of every Hubspot blog post is a post specific bonus that can be downloaded with the exchange of an email

I have noticed my own opt-in rates increase by 200% when employing this method. The best part is all of the delivery and email management is performed automatically by your autoresponder.

3. Introduce new readers to your best material: Blogs, unlike books, are not linear.

Your new subscibers do not read them from start to finish. Once they subscribe they will only see the new articles you post and not anything before then.

When was the last time YOU dug around in the archives of a site you just happened upon?

You can fix that by dripping out the most popular articles to your new subscribers over time with an autoresponder.

4. Followup Purchases: The easiest and cheapest customer to acquire is someone that has already purchased from you in the past.

Following up previous purchases with relevant product upsells is an easy way to increase the lifetime value of your customers and put more cash in your pocket.

For example:

If you run a Crossfit gym, your data will show you that when new gym members stick around for at least 2 months and come in 3 times per week, their average membership duration increased by 12 months.

Knowing this allows you to key in on those first 60 days.

You could employ an autoresponder to send them specific tips and strategies for surviving their first 60 days. Including interviews with other newbies that have made it, nutritionists to help them eat correctly and upselling them life coaching for that preiod of time would all significantly increase their chance of becoming long term members.

5. Incomplete Purchase Reminder: Airbnb is a master of this. Notice what happens if you browse their site, click the book now button but do not actually reserve the listing

You will get this email:

This is a simple but highly effective way to give people that last little push they need to buy.

Sincerely,

Bryan Harris - VideoFruit

PS: Do you use an autoresponder? What has been your most successful one to day? Share it below in the comments.