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If you remember, as a part of the web host consideration list, auto responders are listed. So why are we visiting this topic again? Basically because the auto responder capability offered by most web hosts will only meet the general enquiry needs of your website. For instance, suppose that someone sends you an email requesting information about an auction you have running on eBay. If you have an auto responder assigned to the eBay assigned email address, you might set up a message to immediately respond to all auction enquiries like the following:
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As you see in the above example, the features offered by standard web host auto responders are very limited in nature. Basically when your web site receives a email corresponding to a email address you have set up, a message is sent. Some may provide additional functionality allowing you to attach a file, but the capabilities are generally fairly simplistic in nature.
The needs of auto responders for your business will take on a much more complex nature. For instance, let’s suppose that you have a business selling Product X on eBay. When someone bids on Product X, you send an email thanking them for their bid. In your email, you provide them with the opportunity to sign up for your free newsletter. So far, things are not too complex. They either opt in or ignore your message. If they opt in, you send them the monthly newsletter. This is fairly easy to do with less than 100 subscribers, however as your business grows, managing the list of “opt ins” and “opt outs” can become complex. This is when an auto responder service begins to take on value. They can automatically manage the “opt in” and “opt out” process.
So at this point, you are still manually sending out monthly emails to the various subscribers that are interested in your newsletter.
Suppose that you have developed a 7-week program to teach others about how they can become successful. In you next monthly newsletter (and all following) you offer interested recipients the option of signing up for the 7-week course. Let’s suppose that you are still manually managing your subscription list (which has now grown to 250 people). Ten people are instantly interested and sign up during the 1st month you make the offer. The 2nd month, twelve people sign up, the 3rd month, fourteen sign up, and your main subscriber list grows to 400 total. While you probably can still manually manage the 400 newsletter subscribers, now you are having to keep track of which weekly program subscriber should get which email based on which week they signed up on. The following table represents how things will begin to get more and more complex as time progresses:
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By month 3, week 2, you are sending out three WEEK1 courses, four WEEK2 courses, four WEEK3 courses, one WEEK4 course, four WEEK5 courses, three WEEK6 courses, and one WEEK7 course. Let’s suppose that you are managing more than one business and offer a similar course for that business. As you can see, keeping track of the lists and who gets what on which week becomes more and more complex as time goes on.
Fortunately, there is help. There are a number of auto responder services available to help you automatically manage the whole process. So what should you consider when looking at the features of auto responder services? Here are few considerations: