AUTORESPONDERS: EASE YOUR LIFE
AUTORESPONDERS: EASE YOUR LIFE
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copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin
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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.
About the Author
Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur, founder of
ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make your
business prosper. Discounted Internet services,
FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/
FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/