Email Autoresponders

A Valuable Tool For Business

Updated - 11/21/2002

Does your website hosting service provide email autoresponders? In the world of Internet business, email autoresponders are vital tools that can save you hours of time in customer communications. If you are not using autoresponders in your business, you might be doing more work than necessary - and you might be losing sales because of poor customer service.

Email autoresponders, combined with mailing list capabilities, can play an essential part in generating more return visits to your website.

What are Email Autoresponders?

An email autoresponder is also known as an auto-reply, email-on-demand, mailbot or autobot. They configure email accounts to automatically reply to emails that are received. The reply to the sender is a pre-written message. No matter how many people send an email to the autoresponder address, they will all get the same pre-written message automatically, usually within just a few minutes.

The pre-written message, determined by the owner, can be a vacation reply, sales letter, confirmation notice, or a response to a web form submission etc. Autoresponders will automatically send pre-programmed messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Changing messages on autoresponders is almost as simple as sending a regular email.

How to Use Autoresponders in your Business

Because you can deliver multiple messages, sequential autoresponders are a perfect way to deliver content, promote your business, send sales letters or any other type of information that will drive visitors to your website. Here are a few suggestions for using email autoresponders in your business.

• Order & Sales Confirmations
• Customer Invoices and Special Offers
• Newsletters and Sales Letters
• Training Course Lessons
• Subscription Verification Notifications
• Customer Thank You Notifications
• Notification of Website Maintenance

Basically, whenever there is a situation for sending out information to people who have already emailed you, some form of autoresponder / mailing list can be setup. Its use in your business is limited only by your imagination.

Don't Spam & Always Provide An "Opt-Out"

One of the quickest ways to destroy customer relations and your business image is to send unsolicited email. Unsolicited email (spamming) is seldom wanted and does very little to increase sales. In fact the opposite is true.

Always provide an automatic "Opt-Out" or a address removal option in your mailing list / autoresponder messages. You want to avoid driving away potential return visitors by annoying them with unwanted email messages. Autoresponders have capabilities to automatically remove addresses from the mailing list. Below are sample notifications that can be placed on the bottom of your recurring messages to allow subscribers to be removed from the mailing list.

• Notice: This mail is NEVER sent unsolicited. You are receiving this email because you visited (your website) and requested information about our services.
• Notice: This newsletter is never sent unsolicited. You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed (or someone else subscribed using your email address) to our newsletter.
• This email is intended *only* for opt-in subscribers. We maintain a file of all opt-in requests.

If you are not using autoresponders on your business website, you are working too hard, and you are probably losing sales.

View our Comparison Chart to see some hosts with unlimited email autoresponders included on each account. If your current host doesn't offer autoresponders and you don't want to switch hosts, go to Autoresponder-Review.com to locate some free and paid autoresponder providers.

If you'd like to read some more helpful articles on choosing a low cost hosting provider, then please return to our Hosting Guides section.