An email autoresponder, simply put, is a message that is sent back automatically to anyone who sends you an email message. Here's an example of a real email we receive from one of our spas:

Thank you [name] [email address] for contacting [spa]. We will be contacting you regarding your request very soon. Due to the volume of online requests, it may take up to 48 hours for us to respond. If you wish to contact us sooner, you can reach us directly at (123) 123‑1234.

Email autoresponders are used heavily throughout the business world — a quick Google search will turn up far more results for how to use them than results on why they are bad, bad, and possibly even dangerous.

Yet everyone seems to use them — are they really such a bad thing?  Let's think about it by taking yourself out of your business and into your personal life for a moment with this scenario:

You will be hosting a dinner party.  You invite lots of people, both those you know and those you do not — future friends, future networking contacts, family, anyone.  You arrange for the catering or do lots of advance cooking to make sure your guests will be fed well.  You buy great wine to serve with the food.

The magic day arrives and someone knocks on the door, but you are probably busy.  So, how do you handle the situation?  Easy — your high-tech front door is programmed to automatically open and then play a message to say, "Hi!" and welcome the guest through the doors, letting them know that you'll be with them in as soon as you're able. 

Here are the potential effects of your very special automated door:

• Does the door know whether or not this is an invited guest?  No — it opens and plays the message for any knock.
• If it is a guest, how do they feel?  Like you are placing an artificial barrier between their interaction with you, and supplying information that is not helpful. (Of course you'll be with them soon — after all, you invited them to a party!)
• Further, if it is a guest that you have not yet met, you are now giving them a rather impersonal first impression of your hospitality.
• If it is not a guest, what then? They know you're hosting a dinner party, that's for sure.  But they also know the inside of your house, the fact that you're a cook, what your social practices are, et cetera.

This is what you do every day with your autoresponder.  You supply a temporary and unnecessary barrier to your real and valued clients, a virtual brush-off to potential clients, and a opening to your business email address to marketers and spammers.

Once you've disabled your autoresponder, what should you do?  Easy.  Set aside two short windows of time each day (or more if you are not busy all day long) to genuinely respond to each email that you receive.  Give it the attention it deserves, whether it is a personal response or a quick trip to the trash bin in your email client.

Your business will be more focused, your customers will appreciate the personal touch, and you'll receive less spam.  Can you beat that?

3 Responses...

1. Christopher says:

   February 17, 2010 at 4:02 pm

   Yes, that is an extremely poor use of autoresponders. I hate it when I send an email and get a reply back like that (unless it's a "I'm on vacation and will contact you when I return next week").

   HOWEVER, autoresponders used properly are a gift from God. The use of ours has made us a MINIMUM of $6,000.00 last year alone, and that's just our spa.

   Learning how to use them properly is KEY.

   …it's just that auto-reply autoresponder that is annoying.

   –Christopher

   http://www.dayspaowner.com
2. Charles Weisman, MD says:

   February 17, 2010 at 8:12 pm

   Very interesting details RE: AutoResponders.
3. Benjamin Morin says:

   February 25, 2010 at 11:12 am

   There are places where auto-responders make sense. On web email forms, for example, or on accounts that only get used to receive human generated emails. The biggest problem with auto-responders, IMHO, is the amount of unneeded traffic they generate when used in an inappropriate context. If you have an email address that your customers use to contact your organization and that address has an auto-responder, then the email address that you use to receive statements from your bank or service providers, mailing lists, Facebook notifications, etc. should be different and not use an auto-responder. These types of messages were sent not by a person, but by a process and your auto-responder is just more noise in the sea of unwanted email; if that processes is poorly written, doesn't differentiate between soft and hard bounces, then your auto-response may be erroneously interpreted as an indication of non-deliverability.