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Imagine that you run a successful online business with customers around the globe. You will need to get in touch with your customers every now and then to inform them of any special offers you have or just some simple updates of the business. You will also be interested to know if the emails you are sending out to your customers are actually getting opened and read. Better question, how do you know if the people to whom you are sending emails to even want to receive emails from you? Yet another question, do you need to be awake 24 hours a day just to send these emails out at a suitable time to people in different time zones around the world? Isn’t internet marketing supposed to be easy? The secret to getting all of the above and much more done is to use an Autoresponder. Initially, autoresponders were created, as the name suggests, to automatically respond to emails. Sort of like a phone answering machine but for emails. Today, autoresponders are widely used for list management and also as an email marketing tool which are the most basic facilities provided among others. As a list management tool, the autoresponder functions as an address book. But unlike the address book used in a webmail service, the contact entries in an autoresponder list must be done by a subscription or op-in. This means that a person or contact must enter themselves into the list. This is very important because it means that the contact is a real person who would be more likely to read emails sent to them as they have expressed interest by providing their email addresses willingly in subscribing. Beyond this, a subscription is also regarded as permission given to receive emails. Without this 'permission', unsolicited emails are regarded as spam and a nuisance. A contact in a list will always have the option to remove themselves or unsubscribe from the list. As an email marketing tool, the autoresponder is used to automatically send emails to a part or the entire list. These emails can be for a wide number of purposes ranging from marketing a product to sending useful content and even something casual like a "how are you?" message. Two different types of emails that can be sent are time based (also known as follow ups) and ad-hoc (also known as newsletters). Follow ups can be written even before a list exists and queued into the autoresponder mailing service. Follow ups are sent based on the number of days from the time a contact subscribes into a list. Day 0 will send the email immediately after the contact signs into a list, day 1 will send the email a day after the sign up and so on. Newsletters on the other hand, are emails that are written and sent right away. Most autoresponders also allow newsletters to be sent on a particular date and time. Again, the targeted recipients can either be part of the list or the entire list itself. Some autoresponders may provide advanced features such as geo-targeting where the option to send emails to subscribers from certain countries is available. Another useful advanced feature is the ability to send emails at the same time but in different time zones. This means that the email is sent out in stages as each time zone reaches the desired set time. Advanced features like these are important to ensure emails are broadcasted at times when exposure can be maximized. Finally as with any service, autoresponder providers will charge a nominal fee for their facilities. The fees are usually based on the size of the list that is recorded with the service. The larger the list, the higher the charges. There are of course also free autoresponders available. However as with all other free services, it should be expected to have less features and heavily loaded with advertisements to sustain the costs of running such a free service. Kevin W. C. is an online marketing expert
and
he uses this Autoresponder.
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Autoresponder, newsletters, follow up email, list building,
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