Website Business Tips

I’m sure you’ve seen those little text boxes on websites that ask for your name and email address, right? If not, look up and to the right of this page

Well, that’s called an “opt in email form” or simply put, a way for a website owner to collect contact information from their visitors.

When you submit your details on these forms, the information you entered is sent over the internet to be stored in a database.

Most of the time, your contact details are sent to an “Autoresponder” to store your information.

So, in it’s simplest form, an autoresponder is a piece of software that allows a website owner to store contact details of people who request to be on their mailing lists.

When you want to email the people on your mailing list, you simply login to your autoresponder service provider (there are a bunch of companies out there which I will go over shortly). Once you are logged in, you can type an email that you want to send to everyone, then select which subscribers you want the email sent to.

This is no different than a typical newsletter software service.

Where the “Auto” part of autoresponder comes in is this…

You can pre-write a bunch of emails and store them in an autoresponder service. You can then schedule these emails to be sent out to people on your mailing list at certain intervals. You can have anywhere from 1 to hundreds of pre-written emails stored in your autoresponder at any time.

For example, let’s say you want to follow up with a customer after they buy something from you. Well, it’s a pain to go through each of your customers and hand write each of them a thank you message. So, all you do is send your customers to an autoresponder optin email form after they buy something, and they enter their name and email address into your autoresponder system.

In this example, let’s say you also wrote 5 emails to go out to this new customer. The first one will be emailed immediately when the customer fills out the contact form. This email might say something like “Thank you for your purchase of xxxxxx. We really appreciate your business and if you have any questions about your order, please feel free to contact us at xxx-xxx-xxxx”. (You can be more elaborate than this if you want).

Then, you decide you want to continue writing to this customer to build up a relationship with them, which will make them more likely to buy from you again in the future.

So, you have your autoresponder service send out the second of your 5 pre-written emails four days after the customer signs up. This email can say something like “Hi Bob, I hope you are enjoying your new xxxxxxxx. We’ve been getting lots of great feedback on it from other customers who bought it as well. Again, if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

There are two additional great things about autoresponders:

1) They can appear as if you sat down to write the email to the customer directly (even though that same message could have been sent to 100’s of people the same day). You can insert items in your emails like the customer’s name, which gives the appearance that you took the time to follow up with them directly.

2) It takes NO EFFORT to follow up with people once the original emails are written. The “system” automatically sends out the emails when you schedule them to go out, it keeps track of people who wish to unsubscribe to your mailings, and it can handle sending out thousands of emails a day if you want. Autoresponders are a huge time-saver in business, and really help you keep in touch with your mailing list and customers with little effort.

Like I mentioned before, there are lots of companies that can manage your autoresponders for you. The company we use is called Aweber and they do a pretty good job.We’ve also tried IContact as well which was good too, but they were a bit expensive compared to Aweber.

Regardless of what your business is, it’s always a good idea to use an Autoresponder to keep in touch with prospects and customers. Building that relationship is critical to your success…