An autoresponder is an automatic response provided by email. To fully optimize your customer list and get more prospective customers, you must have a system that automatically provides a number of sequential auto-responses, and that also let you allows you to send your customers messages or newsletters.

Autoresponders provide automated and repeated advertising. According to marketing surveys, it takes 5 or more contacts with a customer before he will purchase a product or service. An autoresponder allows you to keep in touch continuously with your prospective customers, thus increasing your sales and customer retention.

With so many autoresponders in the market, which one is suitable for your business? It ultimately depends on your preferences and usage purposes, but the following points should give you some insights.

What are the most important features that an autoresponder must have?

1) Ability to track click-through rates, open rates and conversion rates

I deemed this feature to be the most important because an email marketing campaign cannot be labeled successful if you do not know how many people actually open your emails, click on your links, or buy your products or services.

You would not be able to customize your future campaigns, tailor-craft your next email message or headlines, or plan your next advertisement. In some cases, just a small change to a headline can mean a whopping 400% increase in your open and click-through rates. Neither would you know where best to place your links within the email body to get the best click-through and open rates.

2) Ability to track the source of your subscribers

It is also vital to know where your subscribers come from, such as from which pages on your website, from which referral website partners, from which search engines, etc. Knowing such information would help you to retain as many subscribers as possible as you would know exactly what they are interested in from the pages they come from.

When I have interesting news about specific topics that are of interest to a particular group of subscribers, I only send my messages to them. This means that my approach is more targeted, and will give me better conversion rates.

3) Ability to create automation rules

In order to improve your professionalism and credibility, it is important for the autoresponder to have the ability to create automation rules. This is because, if someone buys your product after the second or third time, and still gets your sales messages after that, this will create a very bad impression for your customers.

An autoresponder who can create automation rules will allow you to automatically remove these people from the sales follow-up once they land on your customer list. You do not have to waste time manually deleting these customers from your list.

4) Ability to provide spam filter check and a reputable DNS

Lastly, your autoresponder must be able to deliver your messages across to your customers or prospective customers without it being spam-filtered by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It should allow you to check your emails for any spam filter rules before you send them out.

As well, the domain from which you send your email is very important. All major ISPs use DNS blacklists. If just one of your subscribers happened to report you to such a list, the responsiveness of your autoresponder would be hugely affected. So, take note of this point.

Lastly, the following are some autoresponders that I would strongly recommend here, but I would continue with a review of each of them and more in my next post.

1) AutoResponder Plus

2) GetResponse

3) AWeber

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