SpeedieConsulting

They would be able to handle your customer product enquiries, deal with any website information requests, send out free reports or guides, and even send out product literature.

Well you don’t need a physical person to do these tasks, you can set them up to run automatically using either an autoresponder service or using your own Microsoft Outlook.

An autoresponder is not just a message system that lets people know when you are on holiday!

An autoresponder is a piece of software that sits on the Internet and it acts as a response tool. When someone sends a note to it, it automatically replies with a prewritten response. An autoresponder is a bit cleverer than that, it can also drop people into a queue of prescheduled responses so they can receive four or five emails from you over the course of a week or two. You can even set these up to manage a whole marketing campaign spanning 10 or 20 messages. You do the configuring once and it takes over automatically dealing with any enquiries to that specific address.

The beauty of this is that an autoresponder sits on the Internet and never sleeps, so it can be dealing with requests on your behalf at 3am. This improves your customer response times and improves service. You are giving them what they want when they want it.

These are usually paid for services. But if used correctly, you will save yourself a lot of time, effort and an extra salary.

Our recommended Autoresponder software is GetResponse

Using Microsoft Outlook can help you too, if you decide not to go the autoresponder route. While to as clever and complex as an autoresponder service, using Email Rules in Outlook, will allow you to set up one time responses that go out as soon as the email comes into your mail box. There is slightly more work in setting this up as you could have to setup secondary email addresses or have rules that pick out “keywords” in the message subject line.

The only downsides to this are that firstly you can use sequential messages such as marketing campaign and secondly it only works when your PC is switched on and your Outlook is open. Now being “green” I would say do not leave your PC on all the time but it could automate responses for you during working hours.

Let give you some examples that you could use autoresponders for.

• Deliver a free multi part email course to a site visitor.
• Deliver a monthly newsletter – You could write a newsletter in advance and automatically send it out
• Book in Client meetings – They complete an online appointment form and your system sends you a note with the details and sends them a note with any forms you need completing and any other information you want to send them.
• Information Requests – These could be company literature or product brochures via PDF.

There are probably lots more small requests that you could automate and free up lots more of your time to focus working on your business, and not just in it.

These tools are great for the large company as well as small one man bands.