Wednesday, 14 September 2011

What to think about when selecting an auto-responder?

What to think about when selecting an auto-responder?

One of the method to make an effective use Email Marketing is to implement an automation strategy which involve an auto-responder service. But the key thing you need to remember with Email Marketing it is not cool to spam your customers or potential customers. I am in the distribution list of almost all Internet Marketing experts and many of them send you very valuabale information but some of them just spam you with emails using an auto-responder system and guess what I just delete their emails.

You will find many auto-responders systems available online, even though they are split into three primary types - Managed hosted systems, desktop systems and local hosted systems. For a lot of Internet entrepreneurs, desktop hosted and local hosted systems are far preferred over Managed hosted systems because of the level of flexibility and control they will enjoy with these solutions. Although Managed hosted auto-responders systems are very good and their results are often outstanding than autoresponder systems that are under your control.

Most of hosting company provides auto responder systems with their packages but do not confuse them to the managed hosted auto-resonponder systems. Because these systems will not achieve the same results, as the Managed hosted auto-responder systems. You can use them for small campains but not for very large Email Marketing campaign. With local hosted systems for those who have a website hosting company that offer this facility, it is a good strategy to make sure that the auto-responder systems you use matches your domain name. If you use a managed hosted auto responder systems, you will not have the ability to make use of your domain name, using the auto responder system for Email Marketing. Rather, you’ll get an address which from the Managed hosted company who provides the auto-responder systems using their domain name. This is often ideal for some people, although a lot of prefer to obtain their own domains indexed for the
auto-responder system.

There few benefits of using a local hosted auto-responder systems, not only you can use your domaine name but you can also conceal the fact that you are using an auto-responder systems to automate some of your communications to your customers. If you are doing Email Marketing auto-responder systems are great because they same you lots of time and aggravation. Whenever you send emails making use of the email autoresponder systems, it'll display your domain name, in the email address, therefore makes it very difficult to identify the fact that this email was generated by an autoresponder system. Let's say you have 10,000 emails to send because you are launching a new product, you cannot get a better fantastic tool than the auto-responder systems to achieve this goal, sending them manually is not only very painful but there is a real chance you will miss people in your list.

However if you are using a managed hosted autoresponder platform, the people you communicate to will know that you are using an auto-responder system simply because most of the best auto-responder services, people know the name of domains of these services. Although I love the managed hosted platform because they can deliver up to 99.5% of your Email Marketing. But they can also remove the real bond you have with your customers, it is our view the diminished the level connection you would establish if you were just using your own domain name, people like to interact with people not machines or programs. People always respond better to an email Marketing that is coming from a domain that they know than from the email that is coming from a Managed hosted platform, because there is a felling that this email is addressed to you, therefore you may need to respond to this email.

If you're just beginning to use these sysetms to automate your communication with your customers and have limited funds, managed hosted auto-responder systems are better solutions to your business. Unfortunately for local hosted systems there is a initial investment that needs to made before you start seeing the ROI for this expenditure. There are other aspects you need to think about, managed hosted auto-responder solutions are well advanced and very sophisticated and if you try to replicate the technology used by these companies you will need a big initial investment. There is no doubt to start to automate your communications with your customers in a very short term, the managed hosted autoresponder solutions are the best, no doubt, they will give you just a code that you need to add onto your website et voila.

There are many managed hosted autoresponder providers on the net just using Google or Bing you will be able to find them. However the scope of the subject on how you can select a good managed hosted auto-responder provider is beyond the scope of this article. Among the best on the internet which we have used for our customers are Aweber and getresponse, again this is just our experience and what we have recommended to customer, it does not mean that this is good for your business.

Although most of people prefer the usage of local hosted platform, it has a massive disaventaged over managed hosted auto-responder solutions, there is a limit to the number of domain names that you can use, moreover you will need to address the following technical and security concerns: you need to have an expert who can install this solution, you need to learn how to use this new solution and you need to find hardware resources that will allow you to install this solution. You may need to open up some firewall ports in order for this solution to work best.If the scripts used in this solution fail to work properly you need to find an expert with this knowledge who can come and help you fix this issue. The language used in this solution may be a bespoke language therefore may not have in house skills to manage this solution. For example if you are a Windows house and this solution is on a Linux platform you need to have smoneone who is adaptable. You need also to think about your Internet Bandwidth.

Desktop hosted auto-responders are also great for small businesses however they have aslo their disavantages: you are limited on a number of copies you can install, there this solution will most likely be a single point of failure. Most likely if you use this solution for a Large Email Marketing campaign your success rate will be less than 50%. You will still have the above challenges of having in house expertise to manage this autoresponder solution. You will need to make sure that you have enough Internet bandwidth if you are planning to use this in house auto-responder solution.

Although you will find 3 primary kinds of auto responder systems, the kind you select should be compatible to objectives and your business needs. Therefore you can not think because Aweber worked for our customer, it will specifically work for you, your objectives most likely are different from ours. The best way to choose is to think what is your main objective and who do you want to interact with and if the people you wnats to inteact with are not fussed with the origine of the emails. in this article we have just touched on few challenges which you may have when selling this type of solutions for your Email Marketing.

Email Marketing - Auto-responder Service

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