What is an autoresponder?
Historically, in 2004, The Internet Society laid out the Official Protocol Standards, Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail (RFC 3834). These are a set of rules for software that automatically responded to incoming electronic mail messages with a prewritten email response. These included single “out of the office” or “on vacation” type response generators and mail filtering software. Since then, the scope of what we now call or think of as an autoresponder has grown to encompass a much wider range of capabilities related to an email marketing tool.
These days, when people talk about autoresponders, at a basic level, we think about the capability to send pre-written sequences of personalized follow-up email messages. The messages can be sent to one or more contacts on auto-pilot over a specified timeframe. Autoresponders are, therefore, a core component of your email marketing campaigns. arpReach makes it easy to set up and run multiple campaigns.
arpReach allows you to create any number of autoresponders (or campaigns) and each of those autoresponders can have any number of follow-up messages in its sequence.
Each contact who is subscribed to an autoresponder can be at any point in its message sequence. arpReach manages the sending of your follow-up messages, ensuring that each contact receives the sequence of emails over the time period you have specified.
For ease of management, arpReach allows you to keep related autoresponders (or campaigns) together in Autoresponder Groups.
In this section, you will discover how to set up your autoresponder campaign message sequences.
Important Note: Autoresponders are not used for sending one-off messages. While a one-off promotional email can be sent to the *contacts* of an autoresponder, you should send your one-off promotional emails using arpReach’s broadcast capability.
To view the autoresponders action map, click Autoresponders on the menu bar.
The following sections will help you learn how to get the best from arpReach: