Online Email Marketing

An autoresponder is an online service or your own hosted autoresponder software that sends a series of messages (which you create) out to your email list at specified intervals. This is a tool which you can use to keep in touch with customers and present further offers to them, to keep your message in front of prospects, to educate prospects about your products, to get people excited about an upcoming launch - lots of possibilities. All this happens automatically once you've set it up, much reducing your potential workload.

Autoresponder services or software have a variety of features but the most critical question to have answered is: what is the deliverability like? If your email messages never reach the intended recipient because they have been filtered out as spam, everything else is irrelevant.

Another very important question is whether the autoresponder allows or enforces single or double opt-in. Single opt-in is where a person can sign up for your list and is immediately added to the list without any confirmation required. This can make sense when you are adding a customer who has just purchased from you, but in other circumstances it opens you up to email addresses being added by people who are not their owners - and then the real owners tag your messages as spam and you get blacklisted. Bad news. Double opt-in requires anyone signing up to receive an email at the address they signed up with, and click a confirmation link in the email to show the address is correct.

Newsletters are perfectly suited for delivery via autoresponder.

Non time-sensitive newsletters can be written all at one go and then each instalment loaded into an autoresponder series and get delivered to all your subscribers automatically as they join up.

If you have time-sensitive data or information then it needs to go out on a certain date. To do that you use the Broadcast feature of your autoresponder service to send a message immediately to all your subscribers.

You can use broadcasts even if you have a regular message series already set up - the broadcast is sent as an extra message.

When something goes "viral" on the internet, it gets passed on from person to person - and each person passes it on to enough others that the reach and coverage of the message expands until everyone who might pass it on has been reached.

Viral emails tend to be those which have something extremely interesting, funny, shocking, or startling in the content; where passing on the message gives some kind of advantage to the sender, or which have a call to action of some kind which suggests that the recipient should pass them on.

It's possible to craft marketing emails with the intention or hope of them going viral, but it can never be guaranteed.