Infostructure may be a boring topic but it is neccesary one to discuss. Choosing an autoresponder is an extremely important decision. The success or failure of your business will depend to a large part on the autoresponder.
What is an autoresponder? Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia website defines autoresponder as:
"An autoresponder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. They can be very simple or quite complex. Autoresponders are often used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to their prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals " But there is a lot more to autoreposnders than that simple definition.
Your autoresponder is your lifeline to your list. This is the primary way that you will communicate with your list. First write out a series of e-mail messages for your autoresponder to deliver to the people on your list, then you must determine the intervals that your message will be sent to your subscribers who make up your list. Next, you need to determine if you want to have a seperate "autoresponder campagin" for people who have made a purchase from you recently and a different one from those who have not.
As I said earlier your choice of an autoresponder is extremely important. There are two main types of autoresponders, web based autoresponder services, such as Aweber, Get Response and Constant contact or software autoresponders, which you will run based on your computer. There is also a third type, which is supplied by your web hosting company.
There are pros and cons of each. A web based autoresponder will charge a monthly fee, either based on the number of your subscribers or the types and amounts of messages you send out. Software based runs on your own computer and has no monthly fees to use it. But what happens to your list if your computer crashes? Same question applies to the web based services. In addition how much "traffic" can your computer and internet connection handle? Do you want to run your computer 24/7? Consider what features of an autoresponder you actually need and will use and what your budget is.
If you use an autoresponder provided by your web hosting company and you change the host or they go out of business, you can loose your entire list. All the links that you set up everywhere will no longer work and you may frustrate and "alienate your list" if they have problems caused by your autoresponder.
If you are on a tight budget, you might want to do a search on your favorite search engine for free autoresponders, but buyer beware, you get what you pay for(or not)!
Next time, we will go further in depth into this very important topic of autoresponders.
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