What every small business operator always lacks is time. Sometimes lack of time
leads to inefficiency, what in its turn, leads to business failure even if you have
plenty of financial resources.
That is why there are so many programs designed to automate every business step
starting from sign up process and ending with processing online payments.
Autoresponders play a special part. At the dawn of their usage they greatly assist
in solving the most time-consuming business task that is customer support. Nowadays
there are other ways of how autoresponder can help with your everyday routine tasks.
Below are the most common tasks where autoresponder fully reveal its potential:
1. Customer support; 2. Singup/unsubscription procedures; 3. Timely delivered
emails; 4. Electronic materials on request;
Response tracking. The usage of autoresponder as a customer support is based
on the topic your customer interests in. Whether it is problems with program installation,
billing or general question, it will reply with pre-written answers the same moment
email was received from customer.
In very basic way autoresponder can simply notify customer/visitor that his/her
inquiry was received and will be answered within 24 hours.
Subscription/unsubscription is also usually required instant notification. The
majority of existed mailing scripts have an automatic notification feature, still
in its basis it is the same old autoresponder.
Ezine or newsletter subscription is not the only process where autoresponder
can give you a hand. They help in many cases with all sorts of email notifications
of successful sale, accepted inquiry, thanking for completing the survey and many
other cases.
Next way of autoresponder usage proved to earn huge income to many online entrepreneurs.
Timely delivered follow up emails that are based on autoresponder are widely recognized
as a must-have marketing strategy. The theory behind claims that biggest customer
response is gained at 8th contact only. That is why business owners setup a follow
up autoresponder sequence that, when signup for, starts emailing pre-written messages
on specified time basis - daily, every other day, weekly, biweekly etc, generating
the biggest possible response rate on complete autopilot, without any need of owner
interference.
Email courses are small variation of previous strategy. They were designed to
educate interested people, work the same way as product follow-ups do, still serving
as a perfect marketing tool for generating subscribers, customers without any hassle.
Publications on request play another important role. It may be articles, reports,
brochures, schemes, ebooks, audio, video files, any electronic media may be emailed
in the body of the email message or as an attachment to every person immediately
on their request and to an email box they considered to be the fastest to download
from, presumably, ISP's.
As strange as it may seem, autoresponder may be used for tracking response rate
as well. For instance, by putting slightly different autoresponder email addresses
on different web-pages you can easily count how many requests came from each page,
testing which web-page generates the biggest interest.
To track ezine advertisement response you will also have to setup a different
autoresponders for each ezine you plan to run your advert in. At the end you will
see how many people each ezine has sent you and generated the biggest income.
Dominating majority of web-hosting plans, offered today on the Internet market,
come with simple, usually unlimited, email autoresponders. That means they can help
in 4 main cases that we have discussed above, except for timely delivered emails.
That is because they imply one-time reply email, so you can setup (1) customer support
emails, (2) subscription notifications to both your subscriber and yourself, (4)
publications on request, (5) response tracking, but (3) timely delivered emails
like email follow-ups or courses.
In order to offer automatic, say, weekly, email courses you will have to look
for:
1) custom autoresponder internet application (script); 2) 3rd party autoresponder
providers.
The rule of thumb is to know your needs and resources. First choice is preferable
if you know what FTP and CGI mean or have someone with basic knowledge of how scripts
are setup, want to install it once and forever, have time and money to make one-time
investment. You can even try to find free script that in some cases may be even
quicker to setup than sign up for some 3rd party service.
Autoresponder service, provided by independent Internet company, is easier for
new comers as all technical stuff will be hidden, leaving simple web-interface to
manage your autoresponders. For such convenience Internet companies will charge
you on monthly or yearly basis, although there are free so-called adware autoresponders
available.
In general you can find discounted all-in-one services, hosting offers or mailing
lists coming with follow-up autoreponders and allowing you to save money.
