It's really funny how there's so much information on the internet, but when you're looking for something and you don't type in the right keywords, you can't find it. I was recently looking for an "autoresponder" when I should have been looking for a "sequential autoresponder". Apparently they are two different things.
An autoresponder sends an email message in response to someone sending you an email. You may have seen these. Suppose someone is out of the office or gone on vacation. You send them an email and you get an immediate response saying the person is out of the office and what their instructions are. Most web hosts offer you a few autoresponder emails that are designed to handle small jobs such as announcing that you are out of the office.
But suppose you want to send a training course or a drip email campaign. This can be done in one of two ways. The first way is that every person who signs up gets the next email in the sequence. If the email goes out on Mondays and I sign up on Tuesday, I don't get any email for 6 days, and on that 6th day I get the same email as everyone else. Most autoresponders can handle this fairly easily.
But what if you didn't want anyone to miss out on any of the emails? You wanted each person to get email #1 the day they sign up, email #2 so many days later, email #3 so many days after that, and so on until they've finished your training. You get a second sign up and they receive their email #1 immediately and their email #2 the same amount of days later. There's no missed email messages. For that you will need a "sequential autoresponder".
A sequential autoresponder is a timed series of email messages. Very few companies offer the sequential autoresponder.
There is a third option. You can have someone set this up on your own web server using MySQL. I know it can be done, but I have no clue how. If you choose to do it this way, be extra careful to ensure people double opt in to your mailing list. Double opt in means that they fill out the form to receive your emails and you send them an email back saying, "If you are really the one who signed up for this email, and you really want this email, click on this link and prove it." This protects you from being called a Spammer. You don't want to have your ISP banned from the internet providers.
A good use of an autoresponder is when someone signs up for your newsletter, you can offer a free download. When they sign up, an email is automatically sent to the prospect asking them to click on a link. Once they click on the link, the autoresponder sends a second email. This is the email you put the link to their free download in. You set it up once and forget about it until you want to change the item you are offering.
This is different from an ezine, or online newsletter. With an ezine, person A signs up today and gets this month's issue. Person B signs up next week and he doesn't get anything until the next issue is sent. Sort of like a magazine subscription. An ezine sounds like an autoresponder, but the ezine is scheduled to go out by you where an autoresponder is triggered by the person sending you an email first.
Comments(0)