Online promotion these days is about interaction with your prospects, contacts and clients (”your people”). Having an autoresponder at your service is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to increase direct (email) contact with your people.

Frequency is Better

First of all, if you don’t buy into the “frequency is better” approach to promotion you’ll probably not understand the importance of regular contact with your people. Believe it or not, there are some business people out there who are already too busy and don’t want the hassle of proactive communication. I know a few of these, and have actually been in that situation myself a few times.

But for the rest of us, regular communication with our people is important, and this is the reason why using an autoresponder can be so valuable.

What is an Autoresponder?

OK, you may not know what an autoresponder actually is.

An autoresponder is a software program that receives email requests (”subscriptions” or “signups”) from people interested in receiving information about your business, subscribing to your newsletter, taking advantage of a free download, or whatever.

Think of an autoresponder as a kind of receptionist. The phone rings and every time the caller says a magic word – let’s say the magic word is “Bingo” – the receptionist records the caller’s name, address and phone number and then mails them the brown envelope marked “Bingo”.

Your autoresponder is like this receptionist, except it responds to people who fill out an online form. The online form sends an email message to the autoresponder which then adds their name and email address to the list of subscribers.

The autoresponder system then sends out an automated message in response. It normally says something like “Thank you for subscribing to our list” or “Thank you for joining our membership site” or “Thank you for requesting our super duper special.”

And then it tells them what to do next – where to get the special, where to log in to the membership site, how often they will be sent the newsletter, etc., etc., etc. You don’t have to do anything. The system looks after it for you.

What Else Does it Do?

But that’s not all it does. You can also program your autoresponder to send out a sequence of messages that provide your subscribers with other useful information. For instance, when people sign up for our Affiliate Program, they are automatically added to the affiliate mailing list, and they are sent a series of messages, spread out over a number of days, about our products, how they can promote them, special pricing for affiliates, new affiliate tools that have been added, and so on. Once they are on that list we can just keep adding messages to the end of the sequence and they will keep receiving new messages.

So everybody who signs up gets the same sequence of messages. Of course we can even update the messages as things change. So people who sign up in November may get different, updated messages from those who signed up in August.

So you can see that setting up an autoresponder is a way of pre-defining the messages you want to send to certain types of contacts. You “set it and forget it” (at least for a little while). Program in five or ten messages and then just let it go.

It’s not so much about having a list, or even building a list. It’s about actually sending stuff to the list you already have. Once you start doing that in an organized, marketing-minded way you will begin to understand why building your list is so important and powerful. And your autoresponder can help you do that too.