The most important part of having a list is about building a relationship with them. Whether you do this through hand written emails every few days or through an autoresponder sequence doesn’t matter, so long as you build that relationship.
You need to establish yourself as an authority in the niche you are promoting. The idea is to build trust with the subscriber so that they know you are someone they can buy from safely, someone that isn’t going to promote rubbish and someone who will value them.
Having a good relationship with your list can massively increase your conversion rate when you send offers to them. It is not unknown for marketers with a good relationship with their list to convert mailings at 5% to 10% and sometimes even higher.
Using bought, pre-written autoresponder sequences will mean that they do not work on building a relationship. If you choose to use bought messages then you need to re-write them. At the very least you need to add a personalized message to the top or bottom to build a relationship with your list.
One thing that will build a relationship with your list is to not jump on every passing bandwagon and try to sell every product released to your list, particularly using the emails the product owner has written.
Be careful about what you are going to promote and make sure that it is good quality and of interest to your list. If you do choose to market any of these products then you have to make sure that you write unique emails to promote them.
Any product release will be accompanied by a deluge of emails from affiliates promoting the product and few, if any, will write their own messages for the promotion. By doing so, you stand out from the crowd and will build trust, particularly if you point out the faults in a program and tell people not to buy products that are poor quality.
Your messages need to have a personality. This could be your real personality or it could be a personality you have invented for the website, like the Rich Jerk. Whatever the personality is, it has to be consistent across the messages and website.
You can’t have a nice personality on the sales page and then be arrogant and obnoxious in the autoresponder sequence.
Your personality can help you make sales because people buy from people they know and like. By giving your autoresponder sequences a personality people will get to know you and that will help you to make sales.
The relationship you have with your list can make the difference between a list that responds okay and a list that responds well. The difference can be a significant sum of money.
Make sure you spend time building up your reputation and becoming a trust adviser to your list as it will be very beneficial to you in the long run.