AutoResponders for Your On and Offline Business

If you’re not yet familiar with AutoResponders, or are just not yet aware of how you can make use of an AutoResponder for your business. This post should help shed some light for you and possibly give you some ideas on how you can begin using an AutoResponder effectively for your offline or online Business with Email Marketing.

What is an AutoResponder

An AutoResponder is a computer program whether online or offline based, that is built for the purpose of automating standardised emails and bulk email mail-outs. The obvious purpose of this is to increase the productivity of certain email delivery tasks to make your online business run smoothly.

Some examples of the tasks that AutoResponders can manage include sending a standard automated reply when an email is sent to you, emailing to a large database of clients, sending an email after a product has been purchased and sending scheduled emails to a database of clients.

Additional to this a lot of the newer and updated AutoResponders are capable of tracking and reporting on email open rates and click through rates, providing a means to test several different email layouts, wording and subject lines (also known as Taguchi or Multivariate Testing) and some may even offer a shopping cart service.

AutoResponder for Your Online Business

AutoResponders can be made useful to almost any size or type of business. Most are capable of managing mail-outs of 1-100 emails at a time to over 100,000 emails at a time. So let me give you a couple of quick examples of how a business could make use of an AutoResponder.

Example 1 – Offline Business:

Let’s say a local butcher wants to get more customers coming back to his store. He could offer a 5% discount to them to write their email address down and agree to get emails from him.
Now what he could then do is use an AutoResponder to send a bulk email to all of the people on his list when he gets a new cut into his butcher, reminding people he is there and encouraging them to return.

Example 2 – Online Business:

In this example a lady is offering an ebook she wrote on ‘Italian Recipes’ through her food blog. What she can do to increase sales is offer some of her recipes for free if the visitor submits their email to her and agrees to receive emails from her.
With their emails she is now able to remind them via email when she updates her blog and maybe the names of the recipes in her ebook to encourage them to buy. They will also be on the list if she releases another book and she’ll be able to market that to them as well.

As you can see an AutoResponder has a number of different possible uses for almost any business type and I’d be surprised if you couldn’t make use of one for your business.