Introduction to Autoresponders

If you've reached the point of exhaustion trying to keep up with answering the mountain of emails that threatens to bury you alive every single day, you're ready to learn about autoresponders.

The bad news is that people expect prompt replies to their email inquiries. However, unless you can figure out how to work continual twenty-four hour shifts, or hire enough people to constantly monitor incoming emails (while they're eating up your revenue), you have a problem. The good news is an autoresponder is an inexpensive - or even free - method of quickly responding to emails. What these programs do is automatically respond to incoming emails as soon as they are received.

Emails are essential to your business for many different reasons. Most importantly, these invisible email voices give you their feedback about your website - for free! However, if you spend all your working hours answering these emails, how are you supposed to run your business? The answer is simple: use autoresponders. Autoresponders are programs that automatically respond to your emails without you so much as having to click on your mouse.

Email marketing campaigns usually have two objectives: direct response and developing relationships for customer retention. While customer retention is a major objective for B2B marketers, customer acquisition is frequently the objective of B2C and retailing campaigns.

Email marketing remains a vital part of the online marketing mix, despite its ups and downs over the years and continued spam and phishing. Its business marketing success is due to its effectiveness in driving revenue, developing customer relationships and promoting your brand. Users find it an amazingly effective communication service. Now a marketing strategy in its mature phase, email marketing has established some effective best practices.

At the core of these best practices is permission-based email marketing, which continues to be the de facto standard for both acquisition and retention messages. Permission email requires prior affirmative consent as defined by the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the European Commission's Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. Double opt-in is the preferred best practice because it requires a second action to activate the subscription. A confirmation message is sent requiring a reply for verification. This ensures that the email address was actually subscribed.