The importance of autoresponders as an email marketing solution is that they do what they do, without people intervening. It’s like having a customer service or sales person on duty 24/7 without having to pay them. Responders can be set for all types of different inquiries or questions, and the latest versions have quite a lot of intuition built in by using keywords and key phrases to specify the response sent to the enquirer.

For example, Mr. Jones goes on a site, then emails a question about response time on widget YZS. With the right settings, the YZS site when it receives the email will see the phrase ‘response time’ and then automatically sends an email back with links to where on the YZS site information can be found about the response time of the widgets. The next day, YZS site see’s that Mr. Jones IP address hasn’t returned to the site, so it sends an automatic follow up asking – well, whatever you want it to. “Did you find the information you needed? Can we help you with anything else? Thanks for your enquiry, and today we have a special for 24 hours only on widget YZS “. All this can be automated by using autoresponders correctly.