Autoresponders are the modern form of the old Fax-back technology of the 1980s and 1990s. They receive email requests for information and automatically send that information back to the email address specified in the request. They are an excellent way of handling general queries about your product or services, and they operate 24 hours a day. This is very important in the global market of the Internet. It means that potential customers can obtain information wherever they are in the world, whatever time of day it is. You could argue that a website does exactly the same thing, so whay would you use an Autoresponder?

More Than a Robot

Modern autoresponders are much more than a robot that sends out an email in response to an incoming email. It is these additions the basic autoresponder function that make them an essential part of any online business. Once you understand what an autoresponder can do for you, you will see how important it is to your business.

Mailing List

The problem with putting up a website is that visitors come and go and you have no idea who they were. But when you put an autoresponder in the loop, things get a little more interesting. The majority of autoresponders are used via online forms. This means that a web page contains fields in which the visitor enters their details, and a submit button to send the information. Typically, the form will be very simple, asking for the customer's name and email address, but in some cases they ask for considerably more information.

Visitors are often offered an incentive to sign up for the mailing list. This usually takes the form of a free ebook, report, or other digital downloadable item. When the visitor clicks the Submit button, what effectively happens is an email containing the information is sent to the autoresponder. The autoresponder springs in to life and does a number of things:

1. It saves the information in a database. This database is a mailing list.
2. It sends a pre-programmed response back to the visitor's email address. Very often this is a message containing a link to click to confirm that they really did make this request.
3. On receipt of the confirmation, it sends out an email containing the requested information.
4. It sets a field in the database to indicate that the visitor has been sent the message.

The great advantage of this technique over a plain website is that the website owner has captured that person's details and knows that they are interested in whatever he is promoting on the site. The list is a "targeted" list in that it contains the datails of people who are know to be interested in a particular subject.

The Money is in The List

"The money is in the list" is becoming a somewhat hackneyed phrase. This doesn't mean it's not true though. If you have a targeted mailing list, you can send information and promotional offers to all the members of the list, knowing full well that the information or offers are relevant to their interests. It has often been stated that each person on a mailing list is worth about $1 per month. If you have a list of 1,000 people, it should be quite easy to make £1000 per month from them. Not all of them will be buyers every time, so it averages out at that level.

Autoresponder Sequences

It is possible to pre-fill an autoresponder with a sequence of messages, which are then sent out at specified intervals. For example, the first message will be sent out immediately after the visitor submits their details. The second message might go out the next day, the third message two days after that, and so on. This means that as each person signs up to the list, they will begin to receive the entire sequence of messages at the specified intervals. When they join the list is irrelevant - the messages are always sent out relative to the joining date. The autoresponder keeps track of where in the sequence each person is, and when the last message was sent. This allows the autoresponder to schedule the messages accordingly. Once you have your sequence set up, the autoresponder will take care of everything for you. Although you could consider this to be "set it and forget it", it's always worth checking things are running smoothly, and adding new messages to the sequence as appropriate.

Bulk Mailer

Do you have a new product or service to offer your trusty mailing list members? No problem! Write up the message and broadcast it to all your list members. They get the message reqardless of where they are in the sequence.