Autoresponding to Your Opt-In Needs – Part 1
Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 6:37 pm by Matt Van Atta
In my post on December 7, I explained how a squeeze page can help affiliate marketers build those all-important opt-in lists of email addresses. Once you begin collecting those email addresses, the autoresponder becomes an absolute must-have tool for your email marketing efforts.
In its basic form, an autoresponder is a software program that receives a message or inquiry from an email address and automatically, almost instantaneously, sends a reply to that address. No humans are used in the sending of such replies, so you can arrange to send them whenever you want.
Microsoft Outlook contains a classic example of this. Outlook’s “Out of Office Assistant” (available to Microsoft Exchange Server email account users) is an autoresponder that allows you to reply to anyone who sends you an email while you’re away. That way you can get away from it all and not have people think you’ve flown the coop.
But for affiliate marketers, autoresponders go way beyond just sending the “I’m not here” message; they serve as means through which to deliver marketing content to your opt-in list, keeping potential customers engaged in what you have to offer.
Say you’ve built out that squeeze page, offering a report or other piece of free content to the visitor if he or she provides an email address. When the visitor submits the email address, an autoresponder can reply right away, sending the content and thanking the recipient for his or her interest.
Through an autoresponder, regularly scheduled content delivery is easy – whether it’s a monthly or weekly newsletter, a series of report segments, or other content that helps to promote what you are selling. Simply prepare your emails for distribution, set up the autoresponder to send the emails on your schedule, and you’re good to go.
Autoresponder software enables you not only to communicate and maintain your message to your target audience, but also to maintain your overall opt-in list. However, your opt-in list will hopefully grow (and one would expect it will if your website is well thought out and well built). It may become difficult to write content, program the autoresponder, and keep track of unsubscribes.
Also, there are other matters related to your opt-in list to attend to, all while you’re working on other aspects of your business. That means you have more to do than time in which to do it.
That’s where an autoresponder service can come in… which I’ll cover in Part 2.
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