Internet Marketing Tool – Auto Responder
Not only is the auto responder an internet marketing tool – it is an essential internet marketing tool for internet marketing newbies. Now that you understand how to put a website live on the internet you need to know how to build and manage your customer database.
What is an Auto Responder?
For a definition of auto responder I went to wikipedia (well actually I went to my trusty friend, Google first and then to wikipedia).
It seems that there are two separate definitions for auto responder but only one relates to internet marketing. The first definition is an email program that automatically answers email sent to it. An example is the out of office reply that you have no doubt received if you have sent an email to someone who is on vacation.
The definition of auto responder that relates to internet marketing is a software application that automatically delivers information by email.
Why do Internet Marketers Need Auto Responders?
An auto responder is a program that sends emails but it is sooooo much more as well. Most internet marketers would use a web-based auto responder service (I don’t know of any other kind really). The auto responder, as well as being a program that sends emails is a program that stores information about your customers or subscribers. It is a customer database system!
Basically, you keep all of your customer details in the one place and when you want to send them some information or let them know of a special product that you are recommending you can just write an email and send it to all of your customers or only those customers that would be interested in that information. An auto responder service allows you to manage an unlimited number of lists so you can have you customers organized into different categories and using this auto responder software you can choose to send an email message to part of your customer database or to all of your database.
There are two ways that you can send out an email message to your list. Firstly, you can send out a broadcast which means that you send out the same email on the same day to all of the members in your database that the message would be relevant to. This is useful for time sensitive information such as a discount or sale on a product or an upcoming event such as a live training or a webinar.
The second way is to set up a series of messages usually referred to as an autoresponder series. You can specify the amount of time between each message. So you can have constant communication with your customers without the need to write an email every couple of days. You can set up your autoresponder so that your customers get an email from you every couple of days and there is no limit to how many emails that you can load into the autoresponder series. You can load a years worth of emails if you like and then it is really set and forget. The advantage of using an auto responder service in this way is that no matter when someone joins your list they always start at the beginning and don’t miss out on any of your valuable information. So you may have one person in your database that is receiving message no 29 on the same day that someone else is receiving message no 5.
How Do I Get Customers for My Database?
You might be thinking now that it is very time consuming to enter all of that data into the auto responder software. If you already have an existing database of customers then you will have to transfer that data over to your auto responder service and the way to do this is to search in the help or support area of your chosen autoresponder. Read more »
