E-mail Autoresponders and Your Business

Autoresponder programs were first created for e-mail programs to inform when a sent e-mail could not be delivered. From these humble beginnings, the programs have evolved into a widely used tool of internet marketing. Basically, once you have confirmed a potential client's willingness to receive e-mail from you, you can enter that address into your autoresponder program and the autoresponder will then issue preset messages to that client on a scheduled basis. This service is used to continue communication with the client and will hopefully generate extra sales at some time in the future.

Depending on your business, you may make these messages ongoing "lessons" or "updates" or basic advertisements for products you offer. The continuing string of messages you send are entirely up to you. You make keep adding messages for as long as there are people willing to receive them or you can set your autoresponder to issue a set number and then not contact that person again.

There are two types of autoresponder services you can utilize. The first is user based and requires you to subscribe to a professional autoresponder company. You upload them the messages you want sent and determine the frequency. This can be done on a monthly subscription or can be based on the number of messages sent.

Server side autoresponder programs are your own program put on your website's server. The up side to this type of autoresponder program is that it does not cost you more than the initial cost of the program to use it. The downside is that you will need to gain some expertise in how to set the program up and use it. You will need a webhosting service that supports MySQL and Perl programming protocols and tech support that will insure you get the script installed properly.

Once you have entered your "safelist" of e-mail addresses that have opted into receiving your messages, you may set up the time intervals by which the autoresponder will mail messages to them. You can set the autoresponder to always issue the current new message or you can program it to stagger the messages out depending on the date a new client has signed up. That way if you are sending an informational "course" then the new person is started with the first message and the regular routine will send each subsequent message in its preset time and sequence.

Professional autoresponder companies have to protect their reputations by using only the most secure autoresponders. If you are purchasing your own autoresponder program it will be necessary to research the program you are planning to use. Not all of them are perfect and some of the bugs discovered in a few will generate multiple copies of the same e-mail message or send inappropriate message return requests. Either of these bugs can cause spam complaints against your business. There have been some autoresponder programs that actually replicated the messages through the address books of receiver's e-mail accounts. This "sorcerer's apprentice" style of bug will be disastrous to your e-mail marketing campaign.

But autoresponder driven advertising campaigns have proven themselves to be so effective that it is vital to your overall success to use this method. The only other option would be to send out each individual message personally. Once you have a large mailing list the amount of time required becomes so large as to make it unworkable.