Autoresponding The Easy Way

What if you could create a new email address for every single person that contacts you? Wouldn't it be great to be able to remove all the clutter from your inbox and have only relevant people contacting you? Autoresponding is a way of automatically responding to emails that are sent in response to your own contact information.

Use autoresponders as ‘no-reply’ email addresses, such as info@yourdomain.com or feedback@yourdomain.com, which will respond with a preset message when ever someone contacts them. You can use these email addresses for anything - ids@salesforcehelpdesk.com, sf_customer_services@salesforcehelpdesk.com and so on.

Another good use is for delegation. When you get an email, send a copy to someone else to respond to, but automatically cc yourself with the response. This will allow you to monitor all correspondence from customers, and it will help you build credibility and trust – especially if the person responding can’t answer something directly or needs more information before they can respond appropriately.

Traditional autoresponders are so 2004… Autoresponders don’t have to be boring!

You can actually increase customer satisfaction by providing added value with your response, which usually requires the recipient to click a link in your autoresponder message. The click can be used to track the online behaviour of your recipients, and improve your Google ranking in the search results which will direct more traffic to your site. [For more information on this topic read this article .]

Autoresponders allow you to make a personal connection with your customers. They can feel like good friends, and it will follow their email address forever, regardless of how many times they re-write their address or even if they change their name.

The concept is simple: we all have an email inbox full of different people that we associate with different websites or brands, and we all have an autoresponder that is set up so that our reply is sent automatically when someone asks for it. Normally the reply type is auto-responder, but you can have it send to a new email address if you want.

The options for autoresponders are endless!  

You can create your own style of autoresponders, or leverage an open-source script that already has a number of templates to choose from. There's also paid services that let you build autoresponders fast and easy.  You can send email with your personal branding and graphics by adding attachments, or use various other types of attachments as per your requirements like: images, pdfs, videos and so on. [For more information read this article .]

When using autoresponders it's a good idea to design your reply to be on a separate page to your contact form or other content. By having two pages to the contact form you will get faster response times because there are less steps taken before the message is sent. Also the recipient will have more information about your company when he/she takes the decision of whether they want to interact further with it or not.

Using autoresponders in conjunction with email marketing can help you stay relevant, and increase conversions for all of your email campaigns.

If your lead management system allows it, you can also set up rules in such a way that if someone fills out a form on your website with their email address and then leaves without completing your form, an autoresponder is sent to them anyway. This helps you remain top-of-mind with potential customers who have visited your site but not made any further purchases.

The ‘thanks for contacting us’ page is a good example of a simple autoresponder that can be set up. By adding this page to the end of your contact form you can increase the chance that any leads generated from the form will complete it (and therefore follow the path of becoming committed leads).

Conclusion

Autoresponders are a quick and easy way to add personalised value to your customers. You can create them for both email marketing and leads or customers.

For more information read this article on how to use autoresponders .

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For more information on autoresponders read this article:

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