Marketing through auto responder series is a popular strategy to increase repeat website visits and sales. It's easy to get stuck in a rut with only your initial set of e-mail touches going out regularly? Get out of the rut with some of these ideas for auto responder improvements. Here are 12 customer building strategies.

Top sales pros confirm that on average, it takes seven or more communications or sales messages before prospective customers make a purchase. They also confirm that it's generally easier to sell to a referral, because someone they know gave positive testimonial about their products or services.

Do the Two-Step!

What would happen if you combined both of these powerful ideas? An electronic two-step so to speak. Try these two-step tips:

1. Collect leads with your auto responder. If you are not doing it already, start asking for address and phone info to give you various ways to follow up with each opt-im. When you download the e-mail digest of everyone's e-mail addresses and other information from those who requested additional information from your auto responder, follow up multiple ways. Send postcards. Call. Mail sales letters and other promotional pieces.

2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer in an insert, direct marketing package and/or pdf to be made available via auto responder. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material. Then send to the people in #1 above, monthly updates, announcements of new sales and products/services, and a request for referrals.

E-Zine Book

Instead of trying to publish a small daily or weekly eZines, try publishing one large monthly eZine (similar to a monthly magazine) as an e-book format delivered via auto responder, preferably an Adobe .pdf file. You could have it made up of a large number of articles per issue and insert regularly featured areas throughout like inspirational quotes, industry tips, favorite sites and advice from the pros. You could also insert full-color graphics, multimedia components like audio / video file links and ads. Then you can charge a monthly rate, with an annual discounted package purchase, and sell advertising spots to sprinkle in your auto responder announcements for each issue and with an informational series to announce your monthly eZine to new prospects.

Other Good Things You Can Do With An E-Zine

1. Provide back issues of your eZine archives via your auto responder instead of hosting all your archives online. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them and offers a chance to include graphics, audio and video and other components all rolled up in pdf files for quick, easy download.

2. Offer technical solutions and publish your entire website, save it as a pdf and load it up in your auto responder. Sometimes visitors don't have enough time read your entire site or they lose their Internet connection or time online. This way it can be printed out and read offline.

3. You could offer your eBook via an auto responder. Often your visitors won't have to download it or have the software to read it right away, so this way they can take it "to go".

4. For a handy and nice legal touch, you could include the terms and conditions to purchase transactions and load them into an auto responder that is triggered with each purchase. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.

5. Publish free reports to send via your auto responder. The reports should be related to your business or web site and contain info, ads and links to your sites. People love getting freebies.

6. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey. Send this to via auto responder to those who sign up on your site in exchange for a free eBook, software or trial period at your membership site. This type of feedback will help you understand their needs, wants better.

7. Instead of answering each customer question that is e-mailed to you, publish "Frequently Ask Questions" and make them available via auto responder to those who sign up. This also saves you time and reduces support headaches.

8. Instead of publishing all of your customer testimonials or endorsements on your website, publish only a few. And set up an auto responder form that invites visitors to receive a complete list. This way you can give them a power-packed list; it's more effective to include all of them.

Mix and match. Making changes to your auto responder strategy will change your auto responder results! Why not reach out further while at the same time improve your closing ratio's? Do the two-step!

In summary, by using customized marketing techniques like an eZine eBook, tailored to fit your own products and services, you can reach out and increase your website traffic and sales opportunities. Internet marketing can provide more ways to grow your business than you can shake a mouse at!