What is an Autoresponder and Email Marketing? Can they help your business?

What is an Autoresponder and Email Marketing?

There’s lots of talk about autoresponders and email marketing and how they can be used to exponentially grow your business online but what is an autoresponder and what is email marketing? Can they help you successfully grow your business and/or membership website?

• Will any of the top autoresponders from companies such as AWeber, Constant Contact, GetResponse and iContact really have an impact on your bottom line?

What is Email Marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail, usually sent using an autoresponder via a third party email marketing service provider, as a means of communicating. Email marketing typically involves using email to:

• Acquire new customers.
• Enhancing the relationship of a merchant with new, current or previous customers.
• Build customer trust and loyalty
• Solicit sales, donations, repeat business.
• Enhance brand awareness.
• Convince customers to purchase something immediately.

Email marketing can be done using either cold lists (not recommended) or the current customer database.

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $1.51 billion on email marketing in 2011 and will grow to $2.468 billion by 2016. [US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 To 2016]

What is an Autoresponder?

To put it simply, an autoresponder is nothing more than a computer program to automate the answering of emails sent to it. It doesn’t writes the emails for you and it doesn’t generate spam or send unsolicited email (unless you tell it too).

The earliest versions of these programs were designed to return an error report to the sender when an email could not be delivered, so alerting the sender of a problem.

This concept was expanded to deliver instant response notification of email received (but not read) so letting senders know a reply could be expected. This type of autoresponder is generally used on customer service sites to let customers know their email has been received and is being attended to.

The complexity of autoresponders ranges from the simple to the multifaceted and bizarre. The simple being those used to say, “sorry, I’m away on holiday, contact you when I get back”. The multifaceted being those autoresponders capable of automatically managing complex business, affiliate and correspondence programs.

Why Use Autoresponders?

More commonly autoresponders are used in electronic mailing list software, to confirm subscriptions and those wishing to unsubscribe. They are also commonly used as email marketing tools to provide pertinent information to prospective clients with follow-up seductive advertising at preset time intervals.

These follow-up emails are written beforehand, so business resources, such as time and manpower, are not wasted responding to emails every time someone buys something or asks for standard information. Instead, the autoresponder software uses a set of pre-written emails stored on your database to respond to events and queries and supply information to customers at regular intervals.

Promote and grow your business with autoresponders:

• Answer frequently asked questions.
• Deliver information (Membership Sites).
• Build client loyalty.
• Automate customer service.
• Deliver email marketing campaigns.

These types of autoresponders can be divided into two categories, outsourced and server-side.

Outsourced Autoresponders

Outsourced autoresponders run on the suppliers server and are configurable by the client using a web-based control panel. This is good for the client as it is easy to implement with just a small learning curve, the downside is the monthly usage fee payable. AWeber and GetResponse are examples of outsourced autoresponder programs.

Server-side Autoresponders

Server-side autoresponders are those installed on your own server. The benefit of server-side installation is that you have complete control of the implementation. The downside, is the high learning curve required to gain the technical skills needed to implement the installation. The Infinite Responder is an example of a server-side auto-responder and email newsletter application distributed through SourceForge.

The Benefits of Autoresponders

The main benefit of autoresponders is to remind customers and potential customers of your website and products. Most people need to be prompted several times before they buy. So unless you can get them onto an opt-in mailing list, the chances are you will have lost them forever.

This is simply a form of permission marketing. People will give their permission to receive emails in return for you giving them free, quality information. The beauty of this marketing method is that using an autoresponder saves you the costs of printing, packaging and posting and enables you to contact many clients without having to do any work other than provide the email content.

What is an Autoresponder and Email Marketing Conclusion

Should you require more information on email marketing services (autoresponders), then you will find my article, Top Recommended Email Marketing Service Providers valuable.

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed this article, What is an Autoresponder and Email Marketing.