Why the Autoresponder is the Most Important Component of Marketing Automation

Automating your marketing processes using different tools help cut down time spent on promoting your products and services.

Marketing automation done right will allow you to generate new leads and customers down your buying cycle. This is important in creating a sustainable and lean online business.

But if there’s any aspect in marketing automation that bears the most responsibility, it’s the autoresponder.

Why autoresponder?

Autoresponders are emails sent automatically to a mailing list in the form of promotional campaigns.

Successful email campaigns are behaviour-based. This is when visitors perform a specific action on your site. Examples are signing up to an e-course, completing a transaction, and users abandoning their shopping carts, among others.

In the Journey of Email Marketing eBook by Emailcenter, open rates of this email campaign type can go as high as 70%. Despite this figure, only 1/3 of companies are using trigger-based emails.

Autoresponders are best sent using an email marketing platform. You can set the layout and message for every autoresponder and the command that triggers the email to your subscribers. This way, you don’t have to manually send out your emails – your chosen email marketing platform will do this for you.

The reason why autoresponders have become the most important feature of marketing automation is the change in email reader habits.

In the same eBook, more people are reviewing their emails from their mobile devices – 14.8% in 2011 to 47.4% in 2014.

This means more opportunities for email marketers to reach out to their target audience. By launching sophisticated autoresponders with the intention of funneling down subscribers to your buying cycle, you can gain more customers in the long run.

Great! So how can I do this?

Autoresponders are a necessity for all types of websites – blogs, eCommerce, business sites, and others. You can start by reading this guide for the basics of email marketing.

For email marketing beginners, you can get a free trial of GetResponse’s email suite in this link. Trying this out will give you a general feel in using email platforms to create and measure your autoresponders.

The most important thing to consider when integrating autoresponders into your marketing strategy is building an email list. If you’re starting with zero subscribers, read this guide on how you can grow that list into thousands. This is a great place to start if you’re building a subscriber list for your blog.

Another factor in your autoresponder that needs attention is the subject line. Since this is the only thing that recipients will be able to read from their inbox, you need to make the subject line as compelling as possible so they will open your message. Read this post for tips and advice on composing the subject lines for your autoresponders.

Also make sure to create a mobile friendly design for your autoresponders. Lots of your subscribers will be opening your message from their smartphones or tablets, so it’s best that the mail design adapts to the size of the screen. This post shares tips that you should take into heart when designing your email layout.

You will need to track the performance of your autoresponders to increase their open rates and click-through rates by reading this post. If your autoresponders are suffering from low open rates and CTR, you can follow this guide to help you refine your email marketing process and increase their performance.

More on email marketing:

How to Use the Art of Email Marketing to Launch Your Blog & Start Converting

Richard Gorman – Email Marketing Made Easy