The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 5. Autoresponder Services/Software

Autoresponders have been available for at least a dozen years now, but a surprising number of people have never heard of them. In it's simplest form, an autoresponder is a program that automatically responds to an e-mail inquiry.

You send an e-mail to a specific e-mail address, and a preprogrammed response is immediately sent to your e-mail. Originally, it was all done via e-mail, but now it can be done via online forms you fill out and submit.

While simple autoresponders can still be useful for some things (and are included in most web hosting packages), they have been largely supplanted by sequential autoresponders.

With a sequential autoresponder, you still get the immediate response, but the system can also be set up to send you additional information at regularly scheduled intervals. So you might receive the initial response followed by another e-mail two days later ... and another one a week after that. Most services allow an unlimited number of follow-up messages.

Marketing experts are all in agreement that a well-crafted follow-up sequence of e-mails (most recommend a minimum of seven) will boost your overall sales conversion significantly—a 100 percent improvement in conversion is not even considered extraordinary.

Most sequential autoresponder services allow the merchant to send out e-mail broadcasts to anyone who is in the system—so they can now be used for mail list management as well.

In addition to the various services, ...