If you are in business and online you need to have an auto-responder. If you are in business and don’t have a web page or any web presence at all, you likely still need to have an auto-responder.
If you had to choose between having a web site and and auto-responder but not both, I think you would be wiser to choose the auto-responder over the web presence.
Why?
Because an auto-responder allows you to develop a relationship with your customers and prospects.
This is especially important in long term sales processes that take weeks or months to complete. It is also important in retail transactions where the customer is in and out. Particularly if you want to develop repeat business.
A restaurant, grocery store, dentist, nail technician or any other business that wants to keep in touch with their customers should be investing in an auto responder. The goal is to follow up with prospects who happen across your web site and are not yet ready to buy, or to keep in touch with existing customers to encourage them to return more often and to increase their purchases when they visit.
For retail businesses, who do not rely on a web site to communicate with their customers, the secret is to put an offer on the sales slip or cash register receipt.
Offer a coupon, or other freebie for people signing up for your message service. Then stock your auto-responder with a series of evergreen messages to drip on them at a proper interval to keep in touch.
Many businesses plan on doing some sort of customer follow-up on a routine basis, but this good intention plan often gets sacrificed to more urgent endeavors. That’s where the preprogramed value of a series of auto-responder messages shines. The messages will go out as scheduled and you don’t need to do anything special once it’s set up.
You can though periodically send a broadcast message to announce special sales, send holiday greetings and similar messages as well.
The combination helps to make the routine messages appear more personal and timely.
In my opinion the premier auto-responder company has been Aweber for many years, however as they have grown I fear they have also raised their rates and shown some growing pains. They are however easy to use, have great staff support (most of the time) and a lot of neat features. While I’ve become less ardent in my support, they are still a top flight company and worthy of consideration if you are looking for an Auto-Responder company.
There are two other choices I could and do recommend however. If you do not already have a hosting company I would suggest you check out UMC the Ultimate Marketing Center. For a low monthly fee you get not only an auto-responder company but also web hosting and many other services such as an affiliate management service. This would be my top recommendation for people in the internet marketing arena. Your get unlimited web hosting on their c-panel run system plus the auto-responder. It’s not as fully featured as the Aweber platform, but darn close.
It took me a bit of time to figure out their system and I would rate the Aweber system a tiche more user friendly, but with a little bit of effort you can master their system in no time, and save a bundle over having both a hosting account and an autoresponder fee to pay every month.
If you have web hosting already, and just want an auto-responder and want to beat aweber’s higher prices I recommend Traffic Wave. They have a $17.95 price point that stays at $17.95 no matter how large your list grows. That may not seem important when you are starting out, but it will in time as our list grows. What’s also worth checking out is that they appear willing to allow you to import names from other lists. I haven’t actually done this myself, so I haven’t checked out all the details, but this would be a huge relief if you were to decide to move from one auto-responder to another.
I actually use all three of the above services. Which is good and bad. Good in that I am diversified against the occasional glitches that affect everyone. And good in that I use them for different purposes and it helps me keep some things separate. Bad in that I sometimes have to loads the same message in multiple places when I am doing a broadcast I would like to go to everyone.
[tags]autoresponder,autoresponders, auto-responder, aweber, ultimate marketing center, trafficwave, traffic wave[/tags]