Building Client Relationships with Autoresponders

March 10, 2006 ·

Your mailing list is one of your most important practice-building assets. If you don’t really have one yet, it’s time to start building one and make it one of your top priorities. The people on your mailing list are those who’ve used your ADR services, have told you they might be interested in what you have to offer, have had a friend or colleague who referred them, or perhaps subscribe to your newsletter. These are the people who have the greatest likelihood of becoming clients or referring clients to you.

People on Your Permission List Are Your Best Leads

It makes good business sense to put real effort into building an ongoing relationship with these folks. It’s also a way to leverage your energy and finances effectively, since you’re putting time and money where the payoff likelihood is greatest.

I’m not talking about mailing lists that you purchase from list services, your local chamber, or other sources of mailing labels and emails for mass distribution. I generally believe those types of lists are a waste of money for the micro-business owner. You’ll get far more misses than hits and, in the most unfortunate circumstances, you risk that the business from whom you purchased the list didn’t acquire the emails legitimately. The mailing lists worth your effort are your permission lists, made up of people who’ve opted in voluntarily.

Increasingly, small business owners and solopreneurs are relying on emailing lists instead of postal mailing lists, and that’s where autoresponders come in. They simplify your work, keep you on the good side of spam laws, and help you build trust and relationships.

As I described in Favorite Autoresponder: AWeber, autoresponders are software programs that send pre-written replies and other content to people who send a message to a special email address. You’ve probably used an autoresponder if you’ve subscribed to a mailing list from a website, requested a free document to be delivered to your inbox, or signed up for online notification about product or service updates.

How Autoresponders Help Build Relationships

I’m a metrics measurer. I like to know what practice-building efforts are paying off and what ones aren’t worth more of my time and money. One thing I know from almost a decade in full-time private practice is that it takes about 6-9 months from the time I first meet someone at a workshop or speaking engagement until the time they contact me about possible conflict intervention services for their workplace. I call it my “incubation period,” that time prospective clients need to digest what they’ve learned from seeing me speak or train, have follow-up contact from me, and get comfortable with the usually new idea of ADR consulting. Similarly, I know that prospective clients who find me via referral from someone else also have an incubation period as they get to know me and learn ways my services can benefit them and their organizations.

It would be the rare visitor indeed who found my website, either via online search or referral, and decided to hire me based on that single visit. So, I know that one of the goals for my site is to make it worth someone’s while to come back and visit again.

Autoresponders help you create simple ways for visitors to stay in contact—and relationship—with you. When you give a website visitor, a workshop attendee, or someone you meet at a networking meeting an easy way to subscribe to your list, you create a way to continue educating and informing. You do this by distributing quality content (newsletters, informational articles, RSS feeds) and focused, follow-up emails. Using an autoresponder simplifies these tasks substantially.

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