“How Long Should My Autoresponder Be?”

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy here again with another McMethod video session. Today, I want to talk about how long should your autoresponder sequence be, because I get a lot of people have asked me this via email, podcasts. The answer is that there is no answer. The way I want to frame this up is this: When you have a friend, when you have a relationship, you don’t put an end date to that. You don’t say, “Well, I’m going to be friends with you for the next month and then I’m going to stop contacting you.” You don’t say that with your friends. Business is exactly the same. It’s about relationships. You have a relationship with your prospect, whether you’re selling information, whether you’re selling pills, whether you’re selling anything at all. It’s about a relationship.

Why then, when people think about email marketing, do they think about, “Well, how long should it be?” I would say, “As long as it takes.” Either they unsubscribe or they buy. It’s that simple. Buy or die is another way to put that same thing. Buy or die. Either they unsubscribe from your list because they’re not interested or they buy or they just sit on there over an infinite time span, you’d sign up. There’s going to be people who are going to be on your list for a year and then they’re going to sign up, maybe two years. They’re going to have to just keep talking to you, keep hearing from you, on and on and on. There is no ideal length. You want to be doing this regularly.

As far as an autoresponder goes, you can’t build out a three-year autoresponder. That would be too much. You could, but it will take a while. What you want to do is … I’d say, one to three month’s worth of autoresponder emails in there as well as have some sort of weekly newsletter that you send out that’s valuable. It could be a pitch or maybe you just write daily emails or write two emails a week and load them into autoresponder and send them out. Do that every single week and then you’ve contacted them regularly. That’s how it should work. You could do a weekly newsletter, a weekly update. I’d say weekly at the very least, depending on what industry you’re in, but never stop them.

The key thing I want you to understand here is that you should never ever stop contacting them unless they tell you to, “Stop contacting me.” You have no idea when they’re going to buy from you. If you stop contacting them when you think it’s the right time, you’re going to lost out on sales. There’s no question about it. So that’s it. That’s the answer for today. How long should your autoresponder sequence be? As long as it must be. A broadcast or if you send out a newsletter, that’s not an autoresponder. The idea here I want you to take away is that you should never ever stop mailing these people. Get it. Get this. Don’t forget it. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy and you’re watching McMethod video sessions.