When you first go into business for yourself, there are many things you have to learn. Some you are expecting, such as how to find clients, how to keep your financial books, or how to build a website.
But there are other aspects to running a business that many newly self-employed people may not have any idea even exist. One of those is a marketing tool known as an autoresponder.
Many clients I’ve worked with had never heard of an autoresponder until I mentioned it to them. Yet it’s one of today’s most common marketing tools, and, in my book, a tool that your business can’t really be without.
What is an autoresponder?
An autoresponder is a software program that automatically sends emails to your mailing list. Here’s an example of how it works.
Let’s say you are a nutritionist. You have a website to advertise your services, and you also have a monthly newsletter that you send out via email to your contact list. That list consists of current customers and also people who aren’t your customer yet, but have found your website or heard about you and are interested in nutrition. They may end up being clients in the future. Your free newsletter is one of the ways you market yourself.
Anyone can sign up to receive your newsletter by completing a form on your website. It asks for their name and email address. As soon as someone completes the form, you send them a “thank you for signing up” email. If you have 10 people sign up, you have to send 10 emails. And each time you send out your newsletter, you have all those emails to send out.
Now, wouldn’t it be nice if this thank you process was done automatically by your computer? That’s exactly what an autoresponder does. It automatically sends emails out to your website visitors if they take certain actions, such as signing up for your newsletter.
The emails can be newsletters, sales announcements, holiday greetings—anything you like. You write the emails, then you program the autoresponder to send them at certain times.
For example, let’s say you want every new person who subscribes to your newsletter to automatically receive a thank you email. All you have to do is write the email and then tell the software when you would like it to send it out, let’s say immediately after they sign up. Then, each time someone completes the form, they are automatically sent a thank you email. It does it in the background, so you never have to worry about it.
How does an autoresponder work?
There are four main aspects to an autoresponder: content, lists, triggers, and delays.
- Content refers to the emails you create.
- Lists are the contacts you want the emails to be sent to.
- Triggers are the actions someone takes that causes the autoresponder to send an email.
- Delays are the amount of time the software waits before sending a particular email.
These four aspects interact with each other to make your autoresponder work.
You write the email, tell the software which action has to occur before the email is sent, how long after the trigger to wait before sending, and which list of contacts to send it to.
What makes autoresponders really powerful is that you can send a series of emails. Here’s an example.
Let’s say that for every new person who signs up for your email list you want to send out the following 3 emails.
- Confirmation of successful sign up
- Welcome & thanks for signing up
- A bit about us
Once you have everything set up in your auto responder, the schedule might look something like this.
Now every new subscriber gets your complete list of welcome emails, starting with the day they first sign up. That’s a whole bunch of work you no longer have to worry about.
Where do I get an auto responder?
There are many autoresponders available. Here’s just a short list of some of the most popular ones.
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
- Mailerlite
- Active Campaign
- Mail Chimp
Many offer their basic package for free. You typically don’t have to start paying until your contact list reaches a certain size (typically 1,000 or more, depending on the particular software.) To get started, you just need to visit their site and create an account.
As with any software, there is a bit of a learning curve. But once you’ve figured out how they work, they can be a tremendous time saver.
What else can an autoresponder do?
Autoresponders have become pretty sophisticated. And they’re not just for sending out welcome emails. There are other ways you can use them to help you in your business.
Segment your audience
Any action that a person takes can be used as a trigger. Even NOT taking an action can be used as a trigger.
For example, let’s say that you send out an email announcing a sale. In that email you include a clickable button that says “shop now”. If the reader clicks the button, they are taken to the sales page of your website.
Readers might click the button, or they might not. If they do click on it, it means they are at least somewhat interested in your sale. So you might want to send a follow up email a few days later, to push the sale some more.
However, if they don’t click on it, you might want to send a different email, one that still pushes the sale, but in softer way.
The autoresponder basically adds a tag to the contact’s name depending on the action they take. If they click on the button, the tag might be “clicked sale”. If they don’t click on the button within a few days, then they are tagged differently, perhaps as “didn’t click sale”. In a sense, it creates two lists.
Dividing your contact list like this is called segmenting your audience. It can be a powerful sales tool because you can send out different messages based on how ready a person is to buy. That’s important because sales messages work best when the content is tailored to the sales readiness of the reader.
Automate your newsletter
One of the best ways to build trust with your readers is to regularly send them helpful information. You typically do that by sending out a newsletter. But there’s no point sending one out by hand every week—that’s a lot of work. You’d have to send them out one by one. (Because of privacy laws, I don’t recommend you use groups or lists or BCCs, because these are not always completely secure.)
Instead, use an autoresponder. They are more secure, and they save you a ton of work.
Advertise special events
You can set up a series of emails to go out to announce and promote just about anything.
- Sales
- Grand openings
- Contests
- Surveys
- New products or services
Rate the effectiveness of your subject lines
The truth about sending emails out is that only some people will open them. One of the main tools you have to convince them to actually open the email is the subject line. Let’s say you’re a fitness instructor. A subject like “Good morning, I have developed a new service that I think you might need” isn’t likely to encourage many people to open the email. However, “Lose 10 pounds before Christmas!” is more enticing.
Your autoresponder can tell you whether a recipient opened an email or not. Knowing how many people opened a particular email (what marketers call the open rate) can help you determine how good your subject line is.
You can even test out different subject lines by sending half your list the email with one subject line, and the other half the same email but with a different headline (marketers call this A/B testing). Then you can compare the open rates to see if one subject line performed better than the other. You can use what you’ve learned to help you develop better subject lines in the future.
You can use the same tactic to test out different email content.
Clean up your list
Everyone with an email list has at least some subscribers who are dormant—they don’t do anything, they don’t even open your emails. Periodically, it’s a good idea to remove such contacts from your list. It’s a typical sales technique—you only chase those leads that have a chance of becoming customers.
If subscribers aren’t even opening your emails, they clearly aren’t interested in your services. Your autoresponder can tell you which subscribers those are so you can clean up your list.
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With so many possibilities, you can see why autoresponders are so popular. In fact, they are now considered a staple of online marketing.
If you have a website, I encourage you to look into using these great software programs. All the automation not only saves you a lot of time, but the insights you get (such as open rates) are valuable tools to fine tune your marketing.
