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Autoresponders are wonderful! They can be used for
a variety of things, but there are several ways that
autoresponders should not be used. Using
autoresponders in improper ways will make things
a bit more difficult for other people, and it could
make things really bad for you!

Having one autoresponder respond to another
autoresponder creates chaos, and in some cases, it
can overload servers. This happens when you sign
up for something, using your autoresponder email
address. You sign up, and a message is sent to
someone else’s autoresponder, which responds to
your autoresponder, which responds to that
autoresponder  and this continues on and on until
it is manually stopped and straightened out.

Some people use their autoresponder address on
purpose when they sign up for discussion lists. In
effect, this causes an their autoresponder message
to be sent to the entire list, or to one person on the
list, each time a person sends a real message to
the discussion list. Needless to say, discussion list
members and owners frown on this practice, and the
autoresponder owner gets banned.

Avoid these problems and use your autoresponder in
ways that it was meant to be used. Do not use the
autoresponder irresponsibly! Not only will you create
problems for others, but you may find that you get
reported for spam!

Internet Marketing and autoresponders essentially
go hand-in-hand. In today’s online business world,
you simply cannot succeed at Internet marketing
without the use of autoresponders. Autoresponders
are used to achieve many of the marketing tasks
that are essential to a successful online business.

Internet marketing can be very time consuming.
Whether you do affiliate marketing or market your
own products, an autoresponder is a big part of your
marketing arsenal. Autoresponders are used to keep
in contact with your past customers, and to develop
a relationship with potential customers.

An autoresponder can be used to deliver sales
messages to your opt-in customer list. It can be
used to deliver email courses, to send reminders,
and even to help you build an opt-in list if you don’t
already have one. There are many creative ways you
can use your autoresponder to make more sales and
to build customer relations.

Any successful marketer will tell you that there are
two tools that are vital to any type of online
marketing – an opt-in list and an autoresponder. In
fact, most marketers will agree that you could take
away all of their other marketing tools, but they
would fight to the death to keep the list and the
autoresponder!

Building customer interest and excitement is the first
step to successfully marketing many products.
Autoresponders play a vital role in building this
interest and excitement. For instance, if you were
developing an ebook, you may want to start telling
your website visitors and opt-in subscribers about it.
Start building interest; tell them what this product
will do for them, and how soon it will be available.

Do more than build interest by telling them about it.
Use an autoresponder to let them preview your
product! Even though you will be selling the product,
you can allow your potential customers to preview
the information. Have you ever seen previews for
movies that will be playing intheaters soon? It is the
same concept.

Load one chapter of the ebook into an autoresponder,
and put a form on your website where your visitors
can enter their name and email address to receive
the preview chapter free of charge. This gets their
name on your list of potential customer. Each
week, send a reminder email, letting them know how
close the release date is, and what they can expect
from your product ‘ keep building interest and
excitement.

Finally, a couple of days before you are ready to
launch your product offer those that received the
preview the option to buy a pre-release copy. You
canopt to offer a discounted price, or leave the price
as it will be on launch day ‘ the choice is yours.

Take a look at the list of people who signed up to
receive the preview. How many of them are still ‘
subscribed’ to that list? They”ve had the option to
stop receiving notices about your product, but they
chose to keep receiving the information you were
sending. These are highly targeted prospects for
your product. They have already shown you that
they have an interest in your product, and a large
number of those people are simply waiting on the
autoresponder broadcast message that will let
them know that it is time to pick up their copy of
your product!

Isn’t automation a wonderful thing? Using an
autoresponder, you are able to see how much of a
market there is for your product, and build a great
deal of interest in it before it is ever released. This
isthe key to making sales on launch day. Use
autoresponders to build the interest. Get your
prospects excited about what is about to come ‘
andon launch day, give them what they are waiting
for andwatch the sales pour in!

In light of the spam problem, most email clients now
have spam filters installed. These filters catch spam
email and either move it to a ‘spam folder’ or
automatically delete it. After spending a great deal
of time laboring over your series of autoresponder
messages, it would be a shame to find out that the
majority of the messages that are sent out end up
in the spam folder, or are automatically deleted as
spam!

You can avoid this in two ways. First, when anyone
signs up to receive information from your
autoresponder, have them automatically redirected
to a page that gives them instructions for ‘white
listing’ you. Email clients have an actual white list
where the owner of the email client can add specific
addresses that should never be considered spam.

The other way to make sure that your autoresponder
messages get through the spam filters is to check
them using one of the various spam checkers that
are available online. These programs are often web
based, and free to use. They check your message
for words or phrases that commonly trigger spam
filters in email clients. Don’t send out any
autoresponder messages without doing a spam
check first!

Have you received emails that were all broken up?
These emails have one or two words on one line,
then eight or ten words on the next line. In some
cases, one word begins on one line and ends on the
next. These emails are very hard to read, and they
appear to be very unprofessional. Is this what you
want your autoresponder email messages to look
like?

If not, you need to learn how to format your
messages. Start by reading the instructions for your
specific autoresponder. Each one operates a bit
differently in the way that it handles text. For
instance, some autoresponder messages will be
messed up if you do put a ‘hard line break’ at the
end of each line, while others will be messed up if
you don’t! Find out what the right option is for your
autoresponder!

Because each email client is different, you should
not allow any line in your message to exceed 65
characters. This will help prevent lines from breaking
up, and it is achieved by hitting the ‘enter’ key at
the end of each sixty-five character line. The best
way to be sure that your autoresponder messages
are delivered in the correct format is to send them
to yourself, before you send them to your list!

Offering free things to your website visitors is one
marketing method that often results in a lot of sales.
Free courses that are delivered via email are very
popular, and people sign up for such courses on a
regular basis to learn more about a topic of interest
to them. These courses are best maintained and
delivered with the use of autoresponders.

An autoresponder can be set up to send out a
series of lessons for an email course. The lessons
can be set for distribution at specific intervals. You
determine how often the lessons for the course are
sent to the people who have signed up for it. Email
courses are very different from traditional courses,
web based courses, or any other type of course.

There is no student and instructor interaction. The
instructor writes the information out, puts each
lesson in an autoresponder series, sets the timing
for the lessons, and the rest is automated. You can
opt to have lessons delivered daily, every other day,
every three days, or any other time frame that you
think works best for your email students.

Email courses are commonly used to sell products
and services. For instance, if you sell widgets, you
might develop a course that teaches people how to
use widgets or how to care for their widget. Experts
agree that an email course can be written for
almost any product that you can imagine  if you
put enough thought into it.

Start by determining what your course will be about,
and how long it should be. If the course should be
delivered every other day for two weeks, you know
that you would need seven lessons. Write the
lessons, and load them in the autoresponder. Set
the interval for each lesson, which in this case would
be 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13.

This means that the first lesson would be delivered
one day after the person has requested the course,
and the second lesson would be delivered three days
after the person has requested the course, and so
on. The interval for each lesson is set for the
number of days after the person has signed up
Make sure that everything is spelled right, and that
your sentences are grammatically correct. You
want the lessons to look and sound as professional
as possible.

Next, simply advertise the email address that will
activate the autoresponder. Make sure that you run
a test first, sending each lesson to yourself. This will
allow you to see what your email students will see
when they sign up!

Ideally, when you perform customer service, it is
done on a one-on-one basis with each of your
customers. That works quite well in the offline world
‘ but on the Internet, that simply will not do. Your
customers are literally all over the world, and there is
no way that you can really deal with each one of
them personally. That is where an autoresponder
comes in.

Customer service with autoresponders is quite
simple. When an order is place, an autoresponder
can send out the receipt for the sale, the information
for accessing the product, and a ‘thank you’ email.
This happens whether you are logged in to your
computer or on vacation in an exotic location! But
customer service doesn’t always end right there, and
if you are away from your computer, you may be
letting your customers down!

For instance, an elderly gentleman sees your
product advertised and places an order. Everything
goes through just fine, and he receives the receipt,
the download information, and your ‘thank you’ email.
Your product is an ebook, compiled into a PDF file.
This particular gentleman doesn’t understand what
a PDF file is, and he has no idea what you mean by
‘right click to download.’ He needs additional
customer service for the product that he has
purchased, and there is nobody available to help
him ‘ nobody but an autoresponder.

Set up an additional autoresponder that will send out
a list of frequently asked questions or problems that
deal with customer service or how to access the
product. Also set up a support autoresponder. If he
sends a message to support, he should get an
instant message back letting him know that his
message has been received, and how soon it will be
addressed. This will give him some measure of
comfort, and in most cases, he will wait that
specified period of time for assistance.

However, if he doesn’t know how to download the
product, and he sends a message to support, and
nothing happens, he will most likely become very
dissatisfied in a very short period of time. The
difference between a patient customer and an irate
customer is one simple autoresponder message
that can and should be set up in under five minutes.

Really think your ordering process through, and
consider the potential problems that may occur for
your customers. Get an autoresponder set up to
address those problems, and you will find that your
customers are more satisfied with your products,
and extremely satisfied with your customer service ‘
all because your autoresponders handle their
problems right away!

Automation is important to all businesses. The less
time we have to spend doing small tasks, the more
time we have to make more money ‘ or we could
spend that time doing something besides working.
Putting an online business on auto pilot isn’t difficult
at all ‘ and it is all done with the use of
autoresponders!

Autoresponders can be used to get people to your
website, or to promote products and services.
Simply plug your sales message into the
autoresponder, along with some valuable
information that your potential may want or need,
and advertise that autoresponders address.

Once the person arrives at your site, and goes
through your ordering process, another
autoresponder kicks in. This autoresponder
should send out a receipt, as well as information
that will grant the customer access to whatever it
is that they have purchased. Another autoresponder
message should be sent out after this, thanking the
customer for their business, and letting them know
about similar or related products or services that they
may be interested in.

The beauty of this is that while all of this ordering is
going on, and these important customer service
emails are being sent, you can be off doing
something else! The more automation you can
integrate into your online business, the better off
you will be.

If you are using your autoresponder to sell a product
or service, you must be very careful as to how you
approach your potential customer. Few people like
a hard sale, and marketers have known for years
that in most cases, a prospect must hear your
message an average of seven times before they will
make a purchase. How do you accomplish this with
autoresponders?

It’s really quite simple, and in fact, the
autoresponders make getting the message to your
potential customers those seven times possible. On
the Internet, without the use of autoresponders, you
probably could not achieve that. Too often, marketers
make the mistake of literally slamming the potential
customer with a hard sales pitch with the first
autoresponder message ‘ this won’t work.

You build interest slowly. Start with an informative
message ‘ a message that educates the reader in
some way on the topic that your product or service
is related to. At the bottom of the message, include
a link to the sales page for your product. Use that
first message to focus on the problem that your
product or service can solve, with just a hint of the
solution.

Build up from there, moving into how your product or
service can solve a problem, and then with the next
message, ease into the benefits of your product ‘
giving the reader more actual information with each
and every message. Your final message should be
the sale pitch ‘ not your first one! With each
message, make sure that you are giving the
customer information pertaining to the topic ‘ free
information! This is what will keep them interested
in what you have to say.

This type of marketing is an art. It may take time to
get it exactly right. Use the examples that other
marketers have set for you. Pay attention to the
messages that you receive from other marketers.
Start a swap’ file, and keep those messages. Use
some of the better sales copy for your own
autoresponder messages ‘ just make sure that
yours doesn’t turn out to be an exact copy of
someone else’s sales message!

Remember not to start with a hard sale. Build your
potential customers interest. Keep building on what
the problem is, and how your product or service can
solve that problem or fill that need. If you are doing
this right, by the time the potential customer reads
the last message in that series, they will be
convinced enough to make a purchase!

There are laws against sending spam. There are
even laws that you must adhere to when you send
out email that was requested. No matter what type
of email you are sending out, the chances are good
that the anti-spam laws apply to you in some way.

In order to be in compliance with the anti-spam laws
in various states in the US, each commercial email
that you send must include your name or business
name, your street address, city, state, zip code,
and phone number. You must also include
instructions that will allow the recipient to remove
themselves from your mailing list. If you fail to do
any of this, you are essentially breaking the law in
various states ‘ no matter what state or country you
live in!

Protect yourself from spam complaints in any way
that you can. Make sure that when a customer
requests any type of information from you that an
email is sent requesting confirmation before any
other email is sent. If someone is placing an order
from you, include a check box on the order form,
asking for permission to send them periodic emails.
Never use your autoresponder to send unsolicited
commercial email!