Perfect Your Autoresponder

 Online, your competition can reverse-engineer just about anything you do. And they can do so very quickly.

The only thing they cannot reverse engineer quickly is your autoresponder sequence. However long your sequence is, that’s how long it takes them to find out what you’re doing. 

If it’s a 2 year AR sequence, nobody’s going to find out what all you’ve got planned until 2 years from now.

This is very cool.  And I want to talk more about this but first let me go back to the idea of competitors studying each other.

Here’s the naked truth:

Chances are, almost none of your competitors are ambitious enough to carefully study what you are doing. Maybe one or two, certainly not most.

But YOU can be ambitious enough to do that to them, and you should.

LISTEN UP: Testing ideas, offers, landing pages, Google ads and everything - it costs a lot of TIME and MONEY.  Any such data you can get for free, you should by all means avail yourself of.

Even if you’re still a long way from “testing” - even if you don’t even have a product yet - you can do “market research by proxy.” Surveying customers by watching a dozen advertisers and seeing exactly what they’re saying and offering.

Let me give you some tips on spying on your competition - or for that matter, studying anybody who you consider to be a sharp marketer. You can learn a lot of things:

    * Watch their Google ads and see how they change over time. You can click “refresh” on the search results and see if their ads are rotating with other ads. You’ll know what they’re split testing. Days or weeks later you can see if they’ve picked a winner.

    * You can study their landing pages. Where are they taking their customers after that first click?

    * It’s never a bad idea to buy something from them. Often that’s the ONLY way you really know what’s going on. Maybe they’re selling a $14 product up front but adding a $500 upsell in the shopping cart. If they’re doing that, it’s very possible the $500 product is paying all the freight!

    * You can use the Wayback Machine to spy on past versions of people’s websites. You can go back through time and watch the progress of what they’ve done. Tens of thousands of dollars of test data, free!

    * You can study their autoresponders. I think the most important, non-obvious aspect of studying your competition is understanding their “back end” - what is it that they are selling after the first sale? I can assure you, the most effective way to boost the efficiency of a website is the add-on sale after the sale.

    * Use the 80/20 rule. 80% of the good ideas come from 20% of the competition.  You all but ignore most of the players in your market. You can devote most of your “spy time” to one or two really sharp ones.

Your traffic and landing pages are critical, but after that the Autoresponder sequence becomes the BACKBONE of your long-term success. It has everything to do with your longevity in the market.

They hold your audience in a relationship with you even if you’re completely unavailable.  Or if you haven’t even worked out what you’re going to sell to them yet.

It buys you time, and what is more useful than that.