Nowadays, it is a bad idea not to include email marketing as part of your marketing strategy. Email marketing has a very high ROI and produces better results than other marketing strategies like social media, SMS, and direct mail marketing.
Email marketing has many moving parts and things you must constantly monitor to ensure your efforts deliver excellent results. Because of this, many marketers turn to automated solutions like autoresponders for their email marketing efforts. This article will help you understand what autoresponders are and the top autoresponders you should consider for your business or brand.
What is an Autoresponder?
An autoresponder is a system or service that sends time-based and automated messages. SMS and email autoresponders are available to businesses and brands, but we will focus on email autoresponders for this discussion.
An action triggers autoresponder messages, typically a visitor signing up for your email newsletter and becoming a subscriber. They are a great first step for businesses looking to automate their email marketing and can be incredibly powerful in increasing the number of customers you have as well as sales and revenues.
In addition to helping you send pre-written emails at predetermined intervals, autoresponders can also provide you with other capabilities, such as subscriber segmentation for highly targeted and relevant emails, allowing A/B email testing, email editing tools, and much more.
What are The Benefits of Using Email Autoresponder Software?
An autoresponder can help you build a relationship with subscribers. Instead of taking a marketing or sales approach, you can instead build strong subscriber relationships that translate into conversions and sales down the road.
You do this by providing education and informational content to your subscribers through a series of emails. When you do this, you build trust and strong relationships such that when you do make a marketing pitch, your subscribers will be more likely to convert.
An autoresponder service helps you sidestep hard selling. You can use the last few sentences to make our pitch as you deliver the helpful content that your subscribers are looking for and thus likely to be interested in.
Instead of saying, “Here is my product or service; buy it now!” an autoresponder helps you ease into things, taking your customers on a journey that ends with you asking them to consider your products because of how useful they will be to the subscribers.
You can also use an autoresponder to track user behaviour and adjust your messaging and strategy accordingly. Today, the best autoresponders allow you to track things such as open and click-through rates. These numbers will tell you if your subject line, email body, and calls to action are effective enough to get people to convert.
You can further use these metrics to see if things are improving as you tweak your strategy and messaging.
Lastly, an autoresponder helps you build brand recognition. Using the same colours, fonts, logo, and similar images on all your emails leads to people associating these assets with your business or brand. They will be able to recognise it when they see it elsewhere.
What Is the Best Autoresponder?
Because of its numerous features and how easy it is to use, we consider GetResponse the best autoresponder for most businesses. However, we will also look at other options to see which would be better for you because each has different features, pros and cons.
GetResponse: Best Email Autoresponder For Most People
GetResponse stands out as an amazing option because it is a complete marketing platform offering many marketing tools and features, including landing pages, forms, webinar-building tools, and email automation.
Their landing pages and webinars are great for lead generation, and their email automation tools are perfect for turning those leads into customers. Their autoresponder emails can be triggered by many actions and criteria, including contact page submissions, time, and several actions.
Once you add someone to your email subscriber list, you can segment them and add them to different funnels so they can get different emails depending on their funnel. GetResponse also makes creating signup forms easier and targeting your subscribers on social media through ads.
Some of the other features you get with GetResponse include:
- Day-of-the-week selection for sending emails on specified days
- Unlimited messages every day
- Brag and drop email editor
- Cycle management tools
- Advanced timing and email sending settings
- Quick message edits and much more.
GetResponse also integrates with many tools you may already be using, including WordPress, Etsy, Shopify, Stripe, Facebook, Salesforce, and many others.
The main downside of using GetResponse is that it has so many features that using the platform might be a little complicated for some. However, they have simplified the process of creating autoresponders so you can have your email sequences queued up in a little time.
Constant Contact: Best Auto Responder For List Building
Constant contact shines due to its ability to help you build email lists and create a great first impression with new subscribers. Constant Contact gives you numerous email automation tools, including some incredibly useful in simplifying the process of creating email sequences.
It only takes a few clicks to get from the homepage to the email building page, where you can start from scratch or use various templates for the welcome, anniversaries, birthdays, and other types of emails.
Once a welcome email is ready, you can connect that sequence to an existing email list. If you do not have one, Constant Contact gives you various tools to use for this. One of these tools helps you create sign-up forms that you can add to your website or landing page.
You can use this tool to create custom forms and set behavioural triggers, so your forms always appear at the right time. Constant Contact also allows you to use text-to-join, where you send an SMS to a prospect, and all they need to do is reply to it to be added to your list.
Moosend: Best Autoresponder For Scalability
Moosend is the perfect autoresponder for fast-growing businesses such as e-commerce businesses. This autoresponder scales with your company and is trusted by massive brands such as Dominos.
As with other autoresponder services, Moosend gives you all the features you expect, such as the ability to create email sequences, offer exclusive deals through your emails, subscription forms, landing pages, A/B testing, drag and drop editor, and much more.
One area where the autoresponder stands out is e-commerce. You can target customers who have abandoned their cars by using cart abandonment email sequences that you can create directly on the platform.
To help your marketing efforts, even more, Moosend has powerful analytics and reporting tools, different email automation recipes, and advanced automation tools for your marketing.
Here is what you get with your monthly plan:
- Landing pages and templates
- Product recommendations
- Over 100 integrations with other tools and services
- List management and segmentation tools
- Visual automation editor
- Email automation Emails
- User and website tracking, and much more.
Omnisend: Best Autoresponder for Ecommerce
Omnisend is built specifically for e-commerce websites and businesses. Omnisend allows you to integrate multiple channels into one for an automated and streamlined workflow.
With this autoresponder, you can create personalised and automated messages, nurture leads using welcome emails, and use targeting and segmentation to send the right emails to the right people at the most opportune time.
Their targeting and segmentation are based on where customers are on their customer journey. Some segments you can target include repeat buyer, shopper, subscriber, and website visitor. Each of these segments can have specific email sequences and autoresponder campaigns attached to them.
Omnisend also provides you with customisable forms to help with lead generation, with the customisation helping you automate campaigns based on preferences and needs.
The platform provides pre-built workflows for different types of automations and autoresponders, such as order confirmation, cart abandonment, product abandonment, welcome messages, and upselling. These workflows ensure you do not have to start from scratch every time you would like to start a new autoresponder campaign.
SendPulse: The Best Multi-Channel Marketing Autoresponder
SendPulse allows you to automate your email processes as other autoresponders do, but it goes further than that. It also allows businesses to create chatbots for different platforms such as Telegram, Facebook, and SMS.
SendPulse combines web push, SMS, Viber, chatbots and email automation to give you everything you need to run successful campaigns from one platform.
To get started, you can use the drag-and-drop builder to create your emails, with the service offering more than 100 templates to get you started. You also get a visual automaton builder for easier campaign building and management.
Apart from the usual email sequences, you can also set up automations for custom events, re-engagements, abandoned carts, purchases and registrations. All of these automations can be integrated with SMS and push notifications.
Conclusion
Email autoresponders allow you to automate different email sequences, and each service has various features so that you can choose one depending on your needs. Some will allow you to send unlimited messages, some have predefined workflows, while others integrate numerous tools and services, so you have everything you need in one place.
