Are Autoresponders really that important to internet marketing?

Autoresponders have become an essential part of any internet marketer’s toolkit. They allow marketers to recap their tips and send them out multiple times per day, increasing response rates and overall effectiveness. But in the age of automation, do autoresponders really work?

In this blog post, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the world of autoresponders to answer that question for you! We’ll take a look at how they work and what real-world data says about what does and doesn’t help your email copy convert.

Let’s get excited and get to it!

What Are Autoresponders (AR)?

Autoresponders are, as the name suggests, automated email sends that automatically respond to your subscriber’s actions. These include subscribers signing up for your list, clicking links in your emails or even requesting to receive more information about a specific topic. AR can also be used to follow up with subscribers who have yet to take any action as well as sending out scheduled emails on specific dates/times (like Black Friday!). You can also use an autoresponder service to build an opt-in list of subscribers who have signed up for your newsletters or other emails over time.

The benefits of using an autoresponder service are pretty clear: you can get subscriber data from your email campaigns, easily segment the list and create a broad and consistent strategy for people to opt-in. Autoresponder services can also make things easier for you by scheduling emails to go out at specific times or days, which allows you to get more engagement and also helps reduce the volume of your email list.

So What Does Real World Data Say About Autoresponders?

The above graph shows a snapshot of autoresponder strategy from a recent survey that was conducted by Active Campaign on over 20,000 internet marketers. Unsurprisingly, a large portion of marketers (23%) use an autoresponder as part of their email strategy, but more interestingly, the results showed that autoresponders are typically not used specifically to market online.

View the full infographic here.

While it’s true that Marketingautomation.com is not a typical blog and we’re sure there will be exceptions to this data, we wanted to know the real world experience of internet marketers looking to use autoresponders for their email campaigns. So, we put together a list of questions for our readers and asked them about their experiences with sending emails using an autoresponder service.

Here are the results:

Our respondents, who came from a variety of industries, were asked to rate how important they thought different aspects of an autoresponder service were in relation to email marketing. And here’s what they had to say:

Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the marketers surveyed agreed that the ability to send out emails on specific dates was crucial (98%). The second most important feature was segmentation. It is clear that these two features combined gave marketers a huge advantage when it comes to managing their lists and sending out messages to subscribers at exactly the right time.

The most surprising thing about this survey was that only 47% of marketers said that having the ability to build an email list using an autoresponder was ‘very important’. While there is no doubt that segmentation and schedule features are important to internet marketers, it’s surprising that building up a list of subscribers via an autoresponder service is not viewed as a priority. Managing the lists and sending out emails on specific dates are just the first step; building up a subscriber base is arguably more important than getting to send out your emails.

Conclusion: Autoresponder fails where it matters the most

Autoresponders are a fantastic and useful piece of software for Internet Marketers. They can provide a wealth of demographic data about your subscribers, which can help you create targeted email campaigns. However, in practice, autoresponders have fallen short in the area of building email lists.