You’ve probably seen email capture forms with the blanks requesting your “First Name” and “E-mail” on many of the web-sites that you visit.

When someone enters their name and email address, it triggers an autoresponder.

The autoresponder automatically responds (hence the name ‘autoresponder’) by sending a prewritten message to the email address that was entered in the form.

Autoresponders can be used by individuals to instantly notify people that send them emails that they are away on vacation, i.e. ‘I’m out of office‘ reply is sent.

Autoresponder services are more commonly used by online businesses to build client mailing lists and to provide their web site visitors with followup and new information about their products and services. Now off-line businesses are hearing about the great response and are adding a web-site and autoresponder to develop lasting relationships with their customers.

Autoresponder service features most often include the ability to preprogram an unlimited number of prewritten followup responses that are sent at predetermined intervals. For example, the first message is sent immediately after a person subscribes, the second message is sent 2 days later and message number 3 is sent three days after the second message… and so on. This is known as an ‘autoresponder series’.

Autoresponder service clients may also send out broadcast messages to their subscribers on when there is important news or a great special offer. One restaurant in our area sent out a buy one get one free meal offer on a day when schools were closed because of snow, the coupon was good for only that day. I’m sure that email turned a slow day into a better day. All it took was writing a email and sending it to hundreds of subscribers with just the push of a button.

In recent years, autoresponder services have added a feed to email feature that allows webmasters to send published posts from their blogs (and other feeds) to their mailing list subscribers. This is more advanced but I hope to look at this in future articles.

——————————————————————————–

Although there are many autoresponder services available, I personally recommend Aweber – a service that I’ve been using without complaint since starting my online business. Aweber is without a doubt, the world’s leading autoresponder service in terms of features and customer service.

Related posts:

  1. AutoResponder for Business

Filed under: AutoResponer

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!