Online e-Commerce Shopping Cart
and Autoresponder Solutions 

 

I can't tell you how many times I've explained how the process of using shoppingcarts and autoresponders together for lead generation, product funnels and eventually sales.    Are you asking these questions about shopping carts and autoresponders? Why do I need a shopping cart? The most important reason for using a shopping cart is so that you have all of your information, including customers, contacts, prospects, orders, products - well, all of your important online business information in one place. You need to know what Jamie Stockmor ordered and when she ordered? It'll be there. You need to send an email to your prospects about your new product - easy, because all of the people who have been interested in you and your products in the past will be there for you to contact. What is an autoresponder? Autoresponders are a method of sending automated emails out to people after some sort of contact at your site. For instance, if someone purchases one of your products, you set up an automatic email to go to that person thanking him or her. Then, in a few days, you may want to contact that person again to see how they liked your product, then in a few more days, maybe you want to see if he or she would be interested in becoming a member of your site.   All of these emails are set up when you create your order, you connect the order to the autoresponder and the timing of when to send the email out begins, according how you set up each email.   You can add messages and revise them as needed.   Should I just start with a simple newsletter service like Constant Contact? Please take note: I highly recommend that unless you are only interested in sending a newsletter that you choose a different autoresponder than Constant Contact. It is far better to choose a service that will grow with you as your business grows. I can't tell you the number of people who come to me and say; "Kathy, I just signed up for a shoppingcart and all of my contacts are in Constant Contact, I need them in the shopping cart."   This proposes a big problem because now you need to import all of your contacts to the new service and the autoresponder service will require that you send them another opt-in message asking them to confirm that they want to be on your list. Because of people not seeing the message, not being able to recognize the service, they may not re-opt into your newsletter or whatever you are offering, and you face loosing many prospective customers that your've worked so hard to gain. How much should I pay? And now to the good news - for half of what I used to pay for my shopping cart and autoresponder, I am now getting not only the shopping cart, autoresponder, but also an affiliate module, (included), my personal support desk,  newsletter manager and much more.