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I got this question following my latest article in my newsletter.

Hey Nicolette,

I read your last article on how to send out your newsletters, but I was wondering what an “autoresponder” was, you didn’t explain it in the article.

Thanks
Natalie

Autoresponders have been around for years and they can be a powerful addition in your marketing arsenal. Here’s what I wrote to Natalie.

Hi Natalie,

Thanks for the email and I hope you’re finding the info useful. Basically, autoresponders are simply email programs that send out an email or a series of emails that are scheduled to go out at a specific time or in response to a specific action taken by someone. Here’s an example:

The software I use for my mailing list allows me to create an autoresponder for each of my mailing lists. I’ve set mine up so that when someone joins my list, they are automatically sent a copy of the latest newsletter. I’ve set the autoresponder to send out this email five minutes after they join. This is a useful bit of customer service for me because 1) some subscribers sign up because they were interested in what was in the current newsletter. So this gives them (almost) immediate access to what they wanted, and 2) it runs automatically, so I don’t have to fill these requests myself and the subscriber doesn’t have to wait for me to do it.

There’s two different types of autoresponders. You have the “one-time” autoresponder that only sends out one message in response to say, someone joining a mailing list, or someone sending an email to a certain email address to request information. These are fairly common and most hosting services offer this ability as part of the hosting package. The other, more powerful kind is the “sequential” autoresponder. This means that you can set up and schedule a series of follow up messages instead of just one.

I use a sequential autoresponder setup for my mailing list. The first message, which is a copy of the latest newsletter, is scheduled to go out 5 minutes after a person signs up for my mailing list. The second message is scheduled to go out 24 hours after a person has signed up. In this message I remind the subscriber to get their free audio download and give them instructions on how to do it. I also remind them to contact me if they have any questions or difficulty with downloading their audio. The third message goes out 48 hours after they’ve subscribed. In this message I remind my subscriber that they can access previous newsletter articles on the website and give them the link to the archives. And so on and so forth.

Why do I give out this information in a series of messages instead of just one? I’ve found it to be more effective this way because a lot of people either skim over or don’t read their welcome messages when they subscribe to newsletters. If I only put this information in the welcome message, a lot of people will miss it or forget about it. The sequential autoresponder messages serves as a reminder and it also keeps the blog and the newsletter fresh in their minds.

Using autoresponders when someone purchases something from you is also a great way to follow up with your customers. We all know that it’s good customer service to follow up with people who buy stuff from us. By using a sequential autoresponder, you can create a setup that automatically sends out thank you messages and customer service follow up messages without having to constantly remind yourself to send out follow up emails. This saves you time and keeps you in touch with your customers.

Unlike the one-time autoresponders, sequential autoresponders don’t typically come with your hosting service, so you’ll need to use a third-party service like AWeber or you’ll need to install mailing list software that has that ability. The one I use, Oempro does have the ability to create sequential autoresponders built in.

Anyway, I hope this answered your question. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll do an article or blog post that explores autoresponders a bit further. Thanks for asking the question!

Nicolete

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