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dotBiz

Email Autoresponders In e-Marketing

dotBiz logo When you're in business, especially a small business, it can seem that you spend nearly every waking hour on it. There's always so much to do that it's easy for the marketing of your business to take a back seat. Wouldn't it great if you had an extra member of staff that worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for you, never taking a break from speaking to your current and potential customers? Meet your latest recruit – the autoresponder. Errr…the what?

Before going on, here's a fact. On average, people need to be told about your product or service seven times before they'll buy it. An autoresponder is an email tool that lets you send emails automatically without having to be at your computer.

Say you offer landscape gardening services – on your website you could offer a free factsheet "10 Top Tips To The Perfect Garden". To get hold of this all people need to do is give you there name and email address. Once they've done that, you email them your top tips and also tell them that over the next week you'll send another little nugget of gardening information each day. For the next seven days you send them an email, personalised to them, with another tip.

Hang on a sec, though – that's going to be a nightmare trying to keep track of who's to get which email on which day. Not with your new autoresponder on the staff. It will collect all the names and email addresses, and take care of working out who needs to be sent which emails – every minute of every hour of every day.

After the first week, you could follow up with additional emails a few days later, then a week, a fortnight, a month later…whatever. You just tell the autoresponder what emails you want to send and when to send them. You’re now building up a relationship with your potential customer. They will come to know, like and trust you, which are the three vital elements required before someone will buy from you – and it's all done automatically for you.

Autoresponders come packaged with many email newsletter systems, so you can tie it in with sending out your latest news and information. You must remember to follow anti-spam regulations by allowing people to opt in and out of your mailing list. If people feel they're going to get some valuable information for free, they'll usually be quite happy to give their permission to receive emails.