Autoresponders – what the heck are they and do I need one?
I have written about autoresponders before but it is useful to revisit the topic!
An autoresponder is
a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it.
They can be very simple or
quite complex. Hmm, ok.
But do I need one?
Let’s go back to basics and
work with the assumption that you are trying to boost your business and grow
sales.
In order to boost sales you
need more customers.
Imagine if all you emailed
all your customers with an offer. They had to email you back to say yes please
but you had to respond to each one.
Easy enough if you only get
a few emails a day. But what if you advertised and 10,000 people wanted to
email you about the latest product or to be added to your mailing list for your
brochure?
Pretty obvious that you would
need some help or you lose 9,900 of those possible customers.
What an autoresponder does
is it helps you answer all the emails in ONE automated response!
A bit of history…
The first autoresponders
were created within mail transfer agents that found they could not
deliver an e-mail to a given address. These create bounce messages such
as "your e-mail could not be delivered because..." type responses. So
that wasn’t very good! Today's autoresponders need to be careful to not
generate e-mail this ‘backscatter’, which can result in the autoresponses
being considered E-mail spam. Avoiding any emails being classed as Spam is
vital – indeed some spamming is illegal in many countries.
So what do they do for me?
Autoresponders are used as
e-mail marketing tools to immediately provide information to their customers old
and new. Autoresponders are also incorporated into electronic mailing list software,
to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.
They are also used to send follow-up
emails with info, offers and reminders at preset time intervals.
Such follow-up
autoresponders can be divided into two categories (and here are the
rather dry definitions!):
·
Outsourced ASP model — these autoresponders operate on
the provider's infrastructure and are usually configurable via a web-based
control panel. The customer pays a monthly usage fee. This is easiest to
implement for the end-user.
·
Server-side — enables users to install the autoresponder
system on their own server. This requires technical skills.
Autoresponders are also
incorporated into electronic mailing list software, to confirm
subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.
CONCLUSION:
Do I need an autoresponder?
If you only send emails that
are individual and to a few people at a time then no.
But if you are trying to
build a business via increasing customer numbers and more sales then absolutely
YES!
Remember that in the digital
marketing world, one of your main points of contact with your customers is via
email. And it doesn’t take many customers before individual emails becomes
unmanageable. At that point you need to systemize your emails with an
autoresponder.
I use Aweber (click here to try it) but there are a lot of companies that provide the service.
