All About Autoresponders
What are autoresponders?
Autoresponders in a nutshell are email responce programs. Any email sent to you that gets an automatic reply is an autoresponder. For example, when you send in a ticket for a support or sales inquiry to an ecommerce website, the bot that sends you an email saying that your ticket is recieved is an autoresponder. Pretty simple.
Other uses
- Auto reply when you subscribe to a newsletter
- Auto reply when you unsubscribe, confirming your opt-out
- Used as a FAQ when people write in questions
- Build campaigns and have them sent out automatically over time
Benefits
The benefits are endless, but the main one would be saving time. Developing a solid campign that can go out automatically without you having to monitor frees up your time to work on other marketing efforts. the questions and requests that cannot be anwsered via autoresponder can be anwsered by your reply. this weeds out alot of the common frequently asked questions.
How to setup
Most newsletter software systems, well ALL that i’ve seen, have a feature that allows you to setup an autoresponder. You can set up different autoresponders for replies and campaigns. I am going to talk about how to setup your autoresponder for email campaigns.
- Create a normal newsletter campaign - Develop your message as if you were going to deliver it now. Save as a draft or template.
- Develop additional campigns - After your finished with the first campaign, create the follow up messages you want your consumers to recieve and set them in equal intervals apart. For example if you have a 5 week program, set the autoresponder to send one campaign a week for 5 weeks. Refrence your calander to make sure you have the timing down right.
- Test and verify - Make sure that all your links work and content is to your liking. This is the most important step. A bad setup hurts your credability as a marketer
- Schedule and monitor ever so slighty - Are people clicking and opening your message? Monitor your statistics and make changes accordingly. Notice the trends.
Autoresponders are a great tool to use in conjunction with your email marketing plan. They ehance the quality of your newsletter and cut down on time for FAQ, support requests, and developing campaigns. If you aren’t using them already you should be!
Cheers and happy marketing.
Filed under: Inbox Truth
One Response to “All About Autoresponders”
July 27th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Seems like a lot of people don’t post here anymore