By Eric Hammis, 3Sixty Interactive
Think about when you leave your office for vacation or a business trip. You get through your final day and then whip up a quick auto respond email that sends out to people who email you while you’re gone.
Chances are it says something along the lines of, “Thank you for contacting me, I am out of the office, please contact my fellow employee,” blah, blah, blah. It’s the generic auto response which takes roughly a minute to create. Well that’s fine if you’re responding to fellow employees, but when it comes to your auto-response emails with customers and clients, your content is something you don’t want to whip up in a quick minute. You want to take time and be sure your emails are remaining consistent.
So let’s start with consistency. You need to pick a voice for your emails. This voice is the the tone you use with all your outgoing sources. So if you have a light, funny tone you use on your website, social media, etc., you will want to use the same tone on your auto respond emails.
This will allow the recipients to connect and feel comfortable with your auto respond emails knowing that it came from the correct company.
Moving on. Personalization is also a big part of the picture with autoresponders. In fact, personalized emails are proven to improve clickthrough rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. So by simply including a name in the greeting, you’re improving your marketing.
Finally, your auto-response emails aren’t supposed to be another sales pitch. Keep in mind that these consumers already visited your site and took an action. That doesn’t mean they want you to deliver them a sales pitch. So create your content with the idea of building trust and enticing customers to keep you in mind. It’s that simple.
So as you can see, your content goes a long way in auto response emails. Although your autoresponders are only a small part of the overall marketing funnel, they still serve a big purpose, and with quality content, you improve the chances of bringing them back and creating a conversion.