An interesting question, a more interesting one would be, why would anybody consider an autoresponder to be a liability? Perhaps answering this second question will shed a little more light upon the first.

Autoresponders are not new, they have been present for many years, going back to the very origin of email and the internet. Basic autoresponders were used many years ago to send out floods of email, almost entirely unsolicited, to hundreds of thousands of people. This still goes on today, as you can probably tell by the amount of spam email that no doubt turns up in your inbox daily.

To combat this phenomenon, and to try and alleviate the growing demands on peoples time, as they were forced to manually sort through the junk mail each day and find the real email in-between, the idea of email blacklists was introduced. If a domain, mail server or IP address is found to be consistently delivering junk email, it may find itself added to one of these lists. What does being put on an email blacklist mean? Well it means that email sent from the banned entity, will almost definitely be seen by the major email services, email clients and ISPs as junk mail, and either be ignored, or dumped into a users junk email folder in the very least. It must be evidently clear, that any real mail sent from these sources, would also receive the same treatment.

So we can see how an autoresponder may have detrimental affects upon the email delivery of the sending source, but this can only happen if the autoresponder is either used incorrectly, or specifically configured to send email that could be construed as spam and ultimately end up with the source being added to the email blacklists. If this were to happen by accident, then yes, we could say that an autoresponder can be a liability.

But are autoresponders inherently bad? By themselves they are not, if used sensibly and correctly, they can be an asset to any on-line business. The possibilities for time saving, and increased communication with clients is often enormous, but care must be taken not to cross over the line of email good etiquette and use the autoresponder to send unsolicited, unwanted emails to individuals who neither requested it nor want it. This is the grey area, where it could well be said that autoresponders are a liability. But they are only a liability to those people who do not use them as they are intended to be used, if they are employed towards the aims they were developed to serve, then they cannot be a liability, indeed they can be nothing but a useful and productive tool in the hands of somebody who respects the risks involved when using them.

So to answer the original question as a summary, are autoresponders and asset or liability? The answer is neither and both; depending on the usage they are put too.

The real key to getting the best from y9or autoresponder is remembering that the name itself is made up of two very descriptive words. Firstly the word auto, we all know that it means something that is designed to carry out a prescribed action, with no manual intervention. Secondly we have responder, again, a very descriptive word, and we can surmise that a responder would be something that awaits a trigger event and then performs a prescribed action in response.

By keeping these two words in mind, when exploring new uses for your autoresponder service, you can begin to fully appreciate how they can be used to streamline or completely automate many manual tasks. A great example is a customer contact form; let’s say you have a simple form on your page, asking the customer for brief contact information such as email address and name. Traditionally, two things would have happened once the customer submits the form. Either they would receive no indication that their information had been logged, or somebody would manually send them an email, thanking them for their interest, and asking if they required more information or assistance. Both of th3ese methods have serious drawbacks, option 1 is plain bad, people like to be thanked for taking the time to fill in a form, the second draws far too many resources, imagine if you had to send out 100 such emails a day? Even using copy and paste, t would still take quite some time.

An autoresponder can help in this situation, you could use it to send a personalised email to your newly registered user, thanking them for taking the time to supply their contact information, you could also include pertinent details about your products and services, this email can be personalised using the name given in the form, and would look very much like a manually produced reply. This takes zero resources, it is an automated response.

But why stop at a simple thank you email? Perhaps in a month’s time, you have a new product launch or a special offer being produced. You could use your autoresponder to send details to all of your contacts, as quickly as writing a single email. But this is not the whole picture; imagine that you wanted to track who had read the email and who had not even opened it? This would be virtually impossible using a manual system, and certainly it would take an awful lot of time. By using a subscription based autoresponder service, this data will be gathered for you automatically, and presented to you in an easy to read form. You will then be able to re-target the contacts that ignored or overlooked your original email, taking a second bite at the pie so to speak. This would take no more than a few minutes to set up and would represent quite a significant time saving.

The options are endless, an autorepsonder is a very flexible tool if used correctly, by remembering the two key words, auto and responder, you will be able to come up with many ideas to increase productivity within your own business model.

Autoresponders, do you really need one?