Creating and operating profitable solo work-from-anywhere digital businesses

The problems, hassles, and issues with employing email communications in your business are undeniable.  There are certainly things you can do to attempt to minimize the grief you feel about this issue, but the difficulties persist and don't appear to have an easy or totally reliable solution.

Nevertheless, email continues to be a major benefit to small businesses that operate online.  It is there lifeline to their customers, suppliers, and business marketing efforts.

Employing one or more email auto responders to contact your customers at given times is like hiring employees that don't expect to be paid.  What better investment in your business execution could you make?

Here's the problem:  according to Jupiter Media Metrix, the time it takes for most businesses to respond to a customer question is not acceptable.

24% of all businesses never respond to customer inquiries!
33% take 72 hours or longer to respond (that's 3 days)!
11% respond anywhere from 6 hours to 3 days later.

According to this same report, "only 38% of online businesses are reported to be living up to customer's expectations . . ."

Why not set up a simple auto responder and answer customer or prospect questions almost instantly via email?  Do you think your customers might be totally impressed with your customer service and feel a little more likely to buy your products or service if they see how caring and responsive you are?

As a business begins to grow, here is what typically happens.  At first you answer all emails individually.  You can be personal and very responsive because you may only get a few questions each day.

Once your business begins to take off, you still answer emails "by hand" but you figure ways to "can" your messages.  You adopt cut-and-paste tactics to make shorten the time it takes to communicate with your customers.

Eventually, the emails become overwhelming when business is booming.  You could spend all day just performing this one chore.  You need help!

Get an auto responder!  It will save you hours and hours of work and will even perform prospecting and marketing tasks as well as customer service.

So just what is an auto responder?

An auto responder is simply a software program or script that sends an email without human intervention.  Auto responder is short for "automatic responder."

It can be purchased for a one-time fee to "reside" on your server or you can access it as a paid service from an ASP (application service provider) for a monthly fee.

This "automatic answering machine" can be set up in any number of ways to perform multiple tasks in several contexts.

Each auto responder product is a little different in the bells and whistles it includes, but they all are developed for the single purpose of sending your message, when you want it sent, to the right person, without you having to physically handle the email.

Can you understand the power and efficiency of this tool?  It can be employed in the place of one or more humans that you might otherwise have to hire to just answer your mail or respond to customer phone inquiries.

Next, we'll discuss some of the creative ways auto responders are used.

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