Nick Kozel

The most cost-effective marketing tool on earth is the lowly autoresponder. Almost nobody knows how to use the autoresponder today. This technology did not exist as recently as 1994.

This website uses autoresponders: the free reports section and the information on my manual. These are more important in generating members from the web than the web pages are. The Web pages are crucial for keeping members interested, not in gaining new members.

The same is true of your day care's operations.

The Internet is the greatest sales tool since the invention of the printing press. Notice: I did not say "World Wide Web." I said "Internet." There is a big difference.

The web gets all the publicity. It's mostly hype.

Web sites may have lots of graphics. They may have dancing bears. So what? If a website does not produce sales -- a lot of sales -- it is an expensive toy. It takes a lot of high-priced time to run most websites. A very modest site that is easy for the business owner to manage without a paid webmaster is a good idea, but most people don't know where to rent one of these "off the shelf" sites. They do not have time to learn HTML coding. More important, they do not know how to promote a Web site.

Remember: the World Wide Web is one aspect of the Internet. The Internet is broader. The Internet's main application is e-mail. Simple e-mail has no graphics, although you can attach documents, including Web pages, to e-mail. An autoresponder letter costs only the time to write it and about two minutes to post it.

It works better than a website. First, you get the person's name and e-mail address. Second, it can lead to the order of more reports. Third, it is more likely to be read than a web page because it is in a familiar format: a typeset letter or report. Fourth, it is more likely to be read than a Web page because the reader ordered it. He is interested.

If you can supply lots of information that is useful to the reader, an unlimited number of autoresponders allows you to present all of it at no extra charge beyond your monthly web hosting fee. DEMI Press gives you a free web page and free autoresponder reports for your day care's web page.

A report can be printed out. It will stay in the recipient's mail box until he blips it. She will probably read it before she blips it. This is not true of a quick visit to a Web site.

There are other advantages. You can test the response rate of each kind of offer. You can test the response rates of different classified ads for the same offer. You can test the response rates of differently worded letters that promote the same item. Just don't try to test everything at once. Test one comparison, get results, make the change, and then test the next comparison.

Use your Yellow Pages ad to promote a free report on whatever it is that you sell. "Before you buy. . . ." This report helps the customer to make a better decision. Provide information that helps him, even if he doesn't buy from you. This will increase his trust. Also, create a separate phone number for use with this autoresponder letter. This way, you can track the response. It's worth buying a larger Yellow Pages ad to allow you to use this technique.

What I am describing here is so incredibly simple, yet is recognized by almost nobody. The cheapest way to adopt the most powerful marketing tool I know of, the autoresponder, is to rent Web space that offers unlimited free autoresponders. You are in fact renting the autoresponders, not the Web site.

This reverses the widely believed marketing logic of the Internet, of which the Web is the subset that gets most of the publicity, yet which is not very effective as a sales tool, especially for newcomers.

The autoresponder is hidden in plain sight, or as I like to put it, hidden in plain site.