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What is an Autoresponder?
Autoresponders are one of the modern
wonders available to internet marketers and others who need to send emails to large groups of people, both on a regular and irregular basis.
However, autoresponders come in a few flavours
and it is as well to be aware of them as all are described as autoresponders.
The Basic Autoresponder
The first flavour is the simplest. These
have the ability to send a single pre-set email in response to an incoming
email. This is doubtless where the autoresponder term originated. Here the
email system is automatically responding to the sender of an incoming email.
Systems with this level of capability are normally available as part of a web
hosting account at no additional charge. They are useful if you want to provide
a service like "send an email here and we will reply with a list of our
frequently asked questions."
The Typical Autoresponder
Moving up from here we get to the next
level of sophistication. At this level as well as being able to respond to an
incoming email the system also allows for someone opting into or signing-up to
an email distribution list. In this case the system is able to react to an
incoming email or (critically) a request sent from a web form to add someone to
an email list.
They also include the capability to do
confirmed or double opt-in, so when the original request is received they send
an email to the requestor to have them click a web link to confirm their sign-up
to the email list. The owner of the email list can then send an email to
everyone on the list anytime they wish, the system will take care of sending the
individual emails to all the confirmed members. An example of this type of
service is Ezine Director.
They provide a good service (we’ve used them) if you want to create an opt-in
mailing list and send emails to that list all at the same time.
The Sequential Autoresponder
The third and best type of
autoresponders are what are known as “sequential autoresponders”. These go
beyond the capabilities so far described to include the feature of allowing you
to create multiple emails ahead of time to be sent to subscribers at pre-defined
intervals.
An example may make this clearer. One of
our web sites has a sign up section to subscribe to our quiz and newsletter.
When someone signs up and confirms their subscription, they receive an email
from us containing the first question in the quiz. A week later at the same time
of day they will then receive another email from us containing both the answer
to the first question and the second question. This process continues and each
week they receive an email from us containing last weeks answer and this weeks
question.
Here’s the real wonder of sequential
autoresponders – each person who signs up starts at the beginning of the quiz
and week by week works their way through the questions. It doesn’t matter that
John, who signed up 5 weeks ago is now on question 5 and Mary who signed up two
and an half weeks ago now has question 2 and is awaiting question 3 in a few
days; the system takes care of it all.We are staying in contact with our
subscribers without any additional effort on our part (it took a while to create
the quiz in the first place of course.) What’s more we can send out a newsletter
edition to all subscribers at the same time without interrupting this flow.
Examples of good services we have used
are Aweber and our own
ValuedClientSystem.com, the
latter providing additional services to systemise the whole sales and marketing
process.
Between them Paul Quirk & Mark Quirk have more than 40 years of experience at the sharp
end of the IT industry.
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