Autoresponders:
Ease Your Life
by: Pavel Lenshin
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:
Customer support;
Singup/unsubscription procedures;
Timely delivered emails;
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:
custom autoresponder internet application
(script);
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/
info@asbone.com
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