The email autoresponder software is a core element of any online business. It is a critical component in developing a relationship with your prospects and customers. The choice of autoresponder software for your email marketing efforts is critical because moving from one autoresponder to another can become an expensive affair in terms of time, money and subscribers. In this article I will show you what to look for in a email autoresponder software or service
Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a.csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.
Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.
Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.
Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.
Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.
Whether you use a self hosted autorespodner or buy an autoresponder service, these are the functions that must be available in the bare minimum for email marketing success.
Gathering subscribers for your newsletter can be hard work because you have to continually make efforts to direct people to your landing page where you take their email address. If you stop making efforts, your traffic will die out and you will not get any more subscribers.
The alternative is to use a blog to attract traffic. Blogs are a great tool for getting continuous traffic to your website. However, integrating your email marketing software with the blog can be hard, time consuming work if you don’t know web programming.
