Autoresponders

It seems to be common knowledge in direct mail and internet marketing circles across the net that it will often take as many as 7 or more (some say 9+) contacts with a potential customer before he or she makes that coveted purchase.

The process of continuing to follow-up with prospects, to track which messages which contacts have already received when and which ones go out next, to convert these varying levels of interest into full-fledged sales can eat up hours of your time. It can, in truth, become your full time job.

Now, unless you want to dedicate your days and weeks to this follow-up process (or you have enough capital to waste throwing at a full-timer who’ll do this job for you, with undoubtedly some great degree of human error, you’ll probably want to consider having a software program handle it all for you.

In the case of maintaining and building interest with prospective clients until they convert into customers, the software you’ll want is called an autoresponder. Practically everyone selling anything online is using one (or at least one). And if you’ve ever given your email address to a company on their website – to sign up for a newsletter, to request more information, to “join” a free or “trial” membership – you’ve already encountered autoresponder messages.

An autoresponder manages a growing list of prospects, sending each of them a progressive sequence of emails, one at a time, at a proscribed schedule.

An autoresponder could be a free multi-day course directly related to the subject matter of the product or service being sold. 7 days of poker tips from a Multi-Player Poker Site. 5 days of gardening tips from a seed catalog company. 10 days of internet marketing tips from the makers of an autoresponder.

Each day’s lesson may include a handful of valuable tips on the subject plus, of course, a plug for the product or service being sold, and an invitation/request to visit the website (or brick and mortar store) and make a purchase. Typically, each subsequent message “sweetens the deal” a bit more, adding a bonus gift, a special “Limited Time” offer, lowering the price, etc. An autoresponder could be a newsletter, sent out indefinitely, once a month, as long as the subscriber wishes to continue receiving it (or as long as the company publishing the newsletter stays in business). A single company can employ different autoresponders for different purposes. Generally, almost any autoresponder you evaluate (including those reviewed in this section of our website) will perform certain similar functions for you:

manage your email lists, including adding, suspending, and deleting names
manage the subscribing and unsubscribing process, including providing you with a Subscribe/Unsubscribe page that to some degree matches the look and feel of your website
allow scheduling of messages and automatically send out each original “Broadcast” message and each subsequent message in turn, in the right order, at the right times
track clicks from autoresponder messages to (presumably) your site/checkout page
track which autoresponders and message which prospects have already received and prevent sending of those annoying duplicates

Most of the autoresponders reviewed here will also handle “bounced” messages for you – when a message for one reason or another is Undeliverable. There could be any number of reasons why a perfectly valid and active email address could bounce a message once or twice.

If you were to instantly delete that email address from your list, you could be losing a valuable sale. Notice whether the autoresponder you’re considering automatically resends bounced mentions a set number of times before – also automatically – deleting the message.

Unless you have extremely limited needs and no expectation of expansion, your business will probably most benefit from a software package that allows you unlimited autoresponders and unlimited follow-up messages within each autoresponder campaign. Even if you only decide to have one campaign going at any one time, you could always send out multiple versions of the same basic script and track and analyze which one(s) performed the best and which the least.

You’ll also want to get an autoresponder that permits you to attach any type of files you might want – zip files, .PDFs, ebooks, software, etc. – to your messages. You might want the ability to include graphical headers or footers on all your messages, further branding your company.

Now, you may notice, when perusing some of our reviews, that many of these companies offer a free “trial” version of their autoresponder. Usually, these free version of the software not only have restrictions on the number of autoresponder campaigns you can run at once, but will also be ad-subsidized, meaning that each of your message will include either an affiliate ad or an advertisement for the autoresponder company itself. Only with the paid version of the software will you get unlimited autoresponders with no unwanted ads.

Throughout this article, we’ve continually referred to autoresponders as a software product. This is assumes a one-time cost and (typically) a downloadable program (though sometimes you may get the program sent to you in the mail as a CD-ROM).

However, there are also web-based autoresponders that don’t require any software download to use. These, however, require an active internet connection in order to set up and manage your campaigns and you’ll be charged a regular (generally monthly) subscription fee in order to continue to use their services.

As always, there are certain, mostly obvious advantages and disadvantages to each, so before you buy/join, be sure you know which kind of autoresponder you’d like – downloadable product or web-based service.