When you’re compiling a mailing list – that is, people who have agreed to be contacted by you online – you may wonder why you have to subscribe to an autoresponder account. Why can you not simply load all these addresses and emails up in your standard Gmail inbox or other free email service? Surely that would be quite good enough to contact these people. Well, you may think so, but it will cause a lot of problems; a lot more than it may solve.
First of all, the benefit of an autoresponder is guaranteed deliverability. This means that people will receive your messages more often than not. Second, you can avoid being banned for overuse of a server. And finally, it gives you additional analytical benefits, so you can track clicks on your messages and help you to market more effectively.
To start with, let’s look at guaranteed deliverability and why it’s important to you. If you have a mailing list of a thousand people, you want as many people as possible to receive your message. So many autoresponder solutions, which aren’t run by a professional company, have a great disadvantage. These emails can end up in your prospect’s spam folder. This means that they won’t ever open them.
Spam has a cumulative effect. Once a few people start reporting a message as spam, then you will end up in a lot more spam folders, and you may find that of these thousand emails you send only a few hundred of them actually reach their prospect. And that’s before you track how many people open them.
With guaranteed deliverability, these companies are working very hard to make sure that your messages aren’t flagged as spam, and as many as possible can be opened and go directly into the inboxes of your customers. That’s really important for a long time business relationship with them.
Secondly, you want to try and avoid overloading your own server. If you’re using a shared hosting account, you’ll find there is a limited amount of mail you can send each day. And the reasons for this are simple. Companies providing shared service space don’t want to be looked as if they’re spammy, and they don’t want to risk getting their links barred and their prospects barred from Google. So they set strict limits as to how you can send out emails to make sure they aren’t seen as sending spam.
You might also find that you’re accused of overloading the server, perhaps by taking too much processing time. Generally, then, you want to use an autoresponder account run by a third party which covers all these issues and has their own service in place that they are known for.
Finally, you want to be able to track the clicks in your messages. There are several important statistics you need to follow when using autoresponder accounts. First of all, you want to know how many people have opened your emails. If this is a very low percentage, you’ll then look and see what you can do to improve your open rate. Can you use more catchy email subjects, for instance?
Then you want to track the number of clicks inside the message. In most autoresponder messages, you’ll have a hyperlink to an external site. You want your visitors to follow those links to go to these external sites. After all, this is where you’re going to make the money. These might be product sites, they may be affiliate offers, they may be services. So by being able to track the number of clicks, you’ll be able to test the effectiveness of your email campaign. And this is known as analytics.
You can also test different messages within many autoresponder services; that is, send a slightly different version of the message to half your list, or to a smaller fraction of your list. By doing so, you can find out which version is more effective. This can help with your marketing in the future.
By just improving your open and click-through rate by a small number of percent, you can stand to make substantially more income from your messages, which will improve your overall profitability even after the cost of running an autoresponder account is taken into account.
That gives you three good reasons why it’s much more important to use a professional autoresponder service rather than try to operate the autoresponder on your own server. First of all, you’re looking at guaranteed deliverability. You don’t want to be filtered into prospects’ spam folders because it’s very hard to get out of this again. Secondly, you need to work within the limits of your own server, and if you’re on shared hosting, this lot will exclude you from sending out larger auto messages. Finally, you want to be able to track the number of clicks and the exact analytical use of your messages. If you follow these techniques, this will help you to improve your long term profitability rate. All of this can be done very easily with a professional autoresponder service.