In today's business world emails are essential to the success of any business. As your business grows so will the number of emails you will receive. The bad news is that people expect prompt replies to their email inquiries. Unless you can figure out how to work continual twenty-four hour shifts, or hire enough people to constantly monitor incoming emails (while they're eating up your revenue), you have a problem. Before you reach the point of exhaustion trying to keep up with answering the mountain of emails that threatens to bury you alive every single day, you need to learn about autoresponders.

What is an autoresponder? It is an inexpensive - or even free - method of quickly responding to emails. Autoresponders are programs that automatically respond to your emails without you so much as having to click on your mouse. The way these programs work is they automatically respond to incoming emails as soon as they are received.

There are a number of positive was you can use an autoresponder besides just answering your email. For example, autoresponders can be used if you need a way to send information about your services or products, price lists, or if there are repeated questions asked across large numbers of emails. Maybe you want to offer your site visitors a special bonus of some kind, such as advice or relevant articles. All of this can be handled by an autoresponder. Additionally, you can advertise your business and then build stable relationships with your customers by using autoresponders.

Some autoresponders can do more than simply send out standardized messages. They can send out an unlimited number of follow-up messages sent at predetermined interval of time. For example, you can set your autoresponder to send out a new message every day for as long a period as you desire.

There are several Autoresponder programs available from ones that will run with your current email program to a specialized script that runs on your web hosting company's server. This kind of script may use a web page form or simply operate with your email account.

There are numerous companies who offer autoresponders free of charge. Your website hosting company often provides autoresponders as a free service. If this is not the case with your web hosting company, there are numerous companies who offer this service for a small fee, or free of charge, providing you attach an advertisement for their company to your emails.

Once you have your autoresponder chosen make sure to set up your website to contain different email addresses for different contact requests. Each address can then be set up to different autoresponder series of emails to answer the specific request of the inquiry. For example, use info@yourdomain.com for information requests, or sales@yourdomain.com for questions about sales. It's a good idea to set up one for the owner, such as president@yourdomain.com. This presents your company in a personal, approachable light and insures that direct contact is provided.

Autoresponders are an effective and powerful marketing tool, allowing you to make contact with thousands of potential customers. This is an invaluable asset considering how many potential customers you usually have contact with before you make an actual sale. Essentially, an autoresponder allows you to automate part of your marketing campaign.

If you are finding out more of your time is spent answering emails, how are you supposed to run your business? The answer is simple: use autoresponders.

Copyright 2005 Chris Stirling