Email autoresponders are an essential part of taking your online business to the next level of success. Whether you’re an up and comer or an established affiliate, here’s why you need an email autoresponder campaign as part of your online marketing plan.
The basics
First, the basic facts: Autoresponders are, literally, automated email messages. Autoresponder campaigns involve using these automatic messages to communicate to existing and potential customers. They’re also useful for gathering and storing email data lists, promoting your brand, customer service, and much more.
What’s it for?
As their most basic, autoresponders are used for functions like telling business contacts you’re on vacation or can’t be reached at the moment.
In a more advanced sense, autoresponders are used as part of email list-building. Every time a new person signs up to your service, they’re automatically sent an email explaining what they can expect next, or what to do next. And the autoresponder campaign that sends that message also compiles that contact info, for use in a larger customer database.
Usually, autoresponders are sent to customers automatically upon filling out a form on your site, or in response to an email you’ve sent. These include confirmations, notifications, and reminders.
Why do I need it?
Setting up an effective autoresponder campaign is an important step in creating a successful, forward-thinking online business. And, for those who have built or purchased email lists to which messages are sent — and to anyone in the online sales and marketing professions — autoresponders are absolutely essential. Here’s way.
1. Saving Time. By automating your email responses, you can send messages to prospective customers directly and quickly. That means less time spent managing emails, as well as faster responses to your customers or clients — automatically. With autoresponders, you only have to write your messages once, and they’ll be automatically sent to the people you want to see them. That saves a huge amount of time.
2. Customer Service / Communication. If your customer base or client base can’t communicate with you, all bets are off. Particularly in today’s social media saturated Internet, if you don’t at least have an email autoresponder to let people know when they can expect to hear from you, don’t expect to be successful at networking or link building.
3. Promoting Your Brand. Email autoresponders are the online marketers’ most basic, but most effective way of promoting brand awareness. What better way to make sure your customers stay aware of your brand than by sending them regular emails — especially if those regular emails include special offers your customers will want to take advantage of?
4. Building a Database. Particularly for sales and marketing specialists, database building is a key element in online success. And an effective autoresponder campaign makes building a customer database easy, fast, and comprehensive. If you set up an effective autoresponder campaign, you can build your own list without having to by one.
5. Professionalism. Even if you’re small-scale, a professional tone and smooth-running website are essential. Without them, people won’t take you seriously — or follow your ads and your links. It’s not as measurable as some other elements, but, in this sense, lack of professionalism can certainly hurt your conversion rate.
6. CAN-SPAM Compliance. Premium autoresponder services help affiliates navigate the difficulties of the CAN-SPAM Act, which is the U.S. government’s 2003 law governing email SPAM. Read about it here.
Getting Set Up
So you’re convinced — you need an autoresponder email campaign. How to get started?
Or, maybe a better question is, how to get an effective autoresponder campaign started? A simple Google search reveals that tons of free services are available, but how do you know which to pick?
If you take your online business’ future seriously, then autoresponders, and all the benefits they offer, are best paid for. Services like iContact and AWeber specialize in offering comprehensive autoresponder services that make it easy for marketers to build and manager their database lists and email campaigns.
And when it’s time to move to the next level, these kinds of services have those capabilities pretty much built in. When it’s time to implement a more customized, more fully planned autoresponder campaign, you can easily build on top of what you’ve already created.
In the future, we’ll touch on the benefits of such a campaign and best practices for getting it done right.