What is an autoresponder?
Simply put, an autoresponder, as the name suggests, is a tool that automatically sends out a pre-written email as a response to a specific trigger, such as a person signing up to a mailing list or making a purchase online. It is designed to streamline a company’s communications, significantly reducing the amount of time and effort it takes for it to keep in touch with its customers.
If you want to learn more about the topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What can I use it for?
You can use an autoresponder for virtually any application that you could think of that requires you to send out an email in a timely manner or repeatedly to different recipients.
Examples would be:
- When a customer signs up for your mailing list
- When a customer buys something from your online store
- When a customer sends you an inquiry
- When a customer submits a form
- When you want to remind a customer that they have yet to complete a certain activity (e.g., filling out a profile, completing a survey, or signing up for your mailing list)
These days, though, businesses are becoming more creative in their use of autoresponders, employing them for purposes such as:
- Sending out birthday greetings to existing customers to improve retention
- Cross-selling to earn more from each customer who makes a purchase
- Encouraging customers who abandoned their shopping carts to complete the transaction
As long as you have a clear trigger and response to work with, you can set up an autoresponder.
In the case of birthday greetings, the trigger is your CRM alerting you that a customer is celebrating a birthday, and the response is the email greeting. For cross-selling, the trigger is a successful purchase, and the response is an email with related product suggestions. Finally, for abandoned shopping carts, the trigger is the customer leaving the site before completing the purchase, and the response is the reminder email.
Of course, businesses and marketers are not the only ones who can use autoresponders. If you use Gmail or any other email client that has a built-in autoresponder, you can also set up automatic replies, such as away messages for when you go on vacation or canned responses to repetitive inquiries.
Question #2: Should I use it for every email I receive?
No, you should not use an autoresponder for every email you receive. Sending out an automated welcome, confirmation, or reminder email is one thing. Sending out an automated response to every single email you receive is a completely different story because it can easily make your customers feel as if no one in your company is actually interested in talking to them.
Besides, even if you wanted to automatically respond to all your emails, it is virtually impossible to predict the contents of every single email you will receive, so there is no way you will be able to come up with the proper pre-written responses for all of them.
Question #3: What is the difference between an autoresponder and an email marketing tool?
The primary difference between an autoresponder and an email marketing tool is that the former requires a trigger while the latter does not. Email marketing tools allow businesses to automatically send out automated emails to people in their mailing list whether or not these people take any form of action beforehand.
An example would be an email sequence that encourages members of your mailing list to purchase your new product. It does not matter if their last interaction with your company was a month ago. As long as they are still on your list, you can send them the email sequence.
Question #4: Can I only use an autoresponder for emails?
Not at all. There are tools you can use to automatically respond to calls and texts as well, so you can cover all your bases.