Autoresponders are incredibly useful selling tools in that they enable you
to automate the follow-up process via a series of emails.
How does an autoresponder work? Here's a simple scenario. A visitor to your
web site submits their email address for additional product information. He
then receives a series of emails over the course of a few days that provide
the information requested. Each message can ask for the sale and increase the
quality of the offer. For instance, on day one, the basic information is sent.
On day three, the offer is improved with a special bonus. And on day five, the
price is lowered to improve the deal even more.
The law of direct mail/email is that a prospect must be touched at least
nine times before they will be in the right frame of mind to buy from you.
Doing this type of follow-up manually is both time-consuming and expensive.
Autoresponders make this quick and easy.
There are many services you can use to add autoresponders to your web site,
but they frequently are subsidized by text ads which appear at the bottom of
your email messages. Often you do not have the ability to select the type of
ad that is displayed, so you could inadvertently promote a competitor's
product or send an inappropriate ad (MLM, adult, etc.).
Those autoresponders that are not ad-subsidized tend to get expensive if
they are used frequently, and this can get cost prohibitive quickly.
Of the many autoresponder products we have looked at over the years, most
have very powerful features, but they run only on PCs. This means the
autoresponder software needs to connect to the Internet frequently to check
for incoming messages and to send out-bound responses. Only one -- so far as
we have found -- can be installed on an NT web server easily as an NT service -- and
that's why we found Promasoft
Autoresponder very interesting indeed.
This is a powerful product and it is loaded with many features that you
will find useful in automating your web business and communications. It can
best be described as a "hefty app" because it will take you some
time to figure out how to use the tool. But it's worth it.
The interface is a little dry and the size of the type is rather small. The
pop-up windows which launch various modules are crowded with buttons, boxes,
and tabs. Like many adult males who work with PCs all day long, I wear glasses
and I had a difficult time reading the screens. A redesign is definitely
called for -- larger type -- more intuitive navigation -- the use of wizards
-- and some space between screen components would make this tool substantially
easier to learn and use. But if you can get past the interface, you will be
pleasantly surprised.
The manual is exhaustive -- over 200 pages -- but it is rather well written
with plenty of examples, and the developer is also very accessible if you have
additional questions. So the tool is well supported.
The latest version sports a configuration wizard which asks for basic
communications settings so it knows how to connect with the Internet and email
server. Once completed, the tool is ready to be used on a local PC.
Now here's where Promasoft
Autoresponder begins to differentiate itself. Installing Promasoft
Autoresponder on an NT web server is as simple as clicking a
configuration checkbox. That's what I like. No challenging installation
scripts or settings. One click sets the tool up as an NT service. Nice.
To cover all of Promasoft
Autoresponder's features is difficult because there are so many. For
the purposes of this review, we evaluated the Personal edition of the software
which included all of the following features:
Promasoft Autoresponder
