Have eMail Robots Work For You 24 Hours a Day

By Marty Foley
Posted Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Many business people would prefer to have robots do certain tasks to free up their own time or to replace deadbeat employees. Robots don't complain, rob the time-clock, or call in sick before heading to the beach, but they aren't practical for many types of work and the cost is prohibitive.

Unlike conventional robots, email autoresponders are inexpensive and very practical for automating the task of delivering specific types of information to your prospects.

An autoresponder is like an email version of Fax On Demand. Also called a mail robot or mailbot, a true autoresponder is a special program that runs on an Internet server (computer). When email is sent to it, it responds by automatically returning a specific file(s) back to the sender's email address.

This means that prospects can get information about you, your company, your products and services 24 hrs. a day, seven days a week, all without the need for a human to follow up each lead. The process is on full autopilot!

As savvy marketers know only too well, just a minor percentage of prospects that inquire about a product or service are converted into paying customers. Thus, business people must spend time and money responding to requests for information from people that will likely never buy from them. That's just an unfortunate fact of business.

Thus, one objective of business is to fill prospect requests for more information on products, services or opportunities and bring in enough profit from the small percentage that do become buyers to cover all expenses and (hopefully) make a profit.

While it's impossible to precisely identify the tire-kickers versus the real prospects that will eventually become paying customers before investing our limited resources on them, the next best thing is to reduce the expense and effort required to respond to inquiries.

The following example of sending a FAQ is just one example of the various uses for autoresponders. They can also be used for price lists, sales letters, catalogs, or most any other text file that you want. I've even seen them set up to send the text of an entire book by email!

Suppose you kept a careful record of all the questions your prospects and customers ask about your products and services - day in and day out - over a period of time. As you analyze these questions, most likely you'll find that a majority of questions are the same ones - asked over and over again -which you spend much time and money answering - over and over again.

You could then prepare a text file containing a FAQ (list of Frequently Asked Questions), including detailed answers to them, and set up an autoresponder for automatically sending it out by email. Then all your prospect has to do is send an email message to the autoresponder, and within a manner of seconds or a few minutes, receives your FAQ in his or her e-mail box.

While this method lacks the personal touch, and won't totally eliminate time and money spent on prospects, you won't have to spend as much of these precious resources responding to inquiries, because your FAQ, available via autoresponder, answers most prospect questions before they ask you.

Your prospect gets at least many of his questions answered quickly, without any human intervention, and you save time and money in the process, which you can use more productively in other areas. When such prospects get in touch with you later, they will be better informed about your offers (and thus better qualified prospects), and that much closer to doing business with you

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