Say YES! to Success Peg Stookey – Founder of Legacy Connection

What’s an Auto-Responder, Anyway?

This post should really be called, What a Day It's Been!!! What started out as a good idea to help our new subscribers has turned into a circus!

But, I digress!  What is an auto-responder, why use one and how do you do it correctly?

First, if you're reading this it's very likely that you receive our Legacy Connects weekly eblast/newsletter.  A regular newsletter is a very important community tool for us.  We use it to inform our readers of upcoming events (saving them from having to go to our website to find the details); I share "teaching moments" as does my right hand gal, Hilairy; we do some marketing, we highlight community members and speakers, and, in general, we keep our community informed.

I've had people join our community membership after receiving the newsletter for 4 years and never come to a meeting!  That's a pretty powerful communication tool!  In fact, I've recently read that electronic newsletters were surpassing blogs in effectiveness.  As I'm writing a blog about newsletters I have to say that I think both are necessary and each has its place!

Anyway, I've also been learning about the importance of auto-responders. An auto-responder is a series of emails that you write, choose the frequency of and schedule the delivery.  This can all be automated in a newsletter system such as iContact, which is what I use.  In my case, I wanted to use an auto-responder to share more information about our weekly eBlast and Legacy Connection in general.  I chose to send an initial, brief welcome to the new subscriber and then 5 informative emails after that.

This is where it gets tricky and also where I have another opportunity to share my hard won learning with you! When I initially set up the auto-responder last May, I guess I failed to complete the process.  It turns out that I needed to "enable" it for it to work.  Here's the "my bad":  I didn't check on it! For some reason I assumed that it was being deployed and that I just hadn't received any feedback.  I really should know better.  People send me feedback ALL THE TIME!  (This is a good thing though!)

So....today, I realized my mistake and "enabled" the long forgotten auto-responder.  YIKES, OOPS, MY BAD, I'M SORRY, and I'M SOOOOOOOOOOOOO VERY SORRY is how I've started numerous emails since!  You see, the system thought it would make up for lost time and send all 6 emails at once.  To make matters worse, I had scheduled a weekly email to go out as well so these poor subscribers received 6-7 emails from me today!  Now, I know that people hang on my every word but really, 6 eblast type emails is WAY too many!

Here's an interesting thing though.  It wasn't all bad!

• I've had the chance to communicate with people that I wouldn't otherwise have talked to today.
• I've have people step up and offer to help try to figure out the problem.
• I've been given the opportunity to look more closely at stats.
• I was able to fix a couple subscription problems that might have gone unnoticed.
• I learned how helpful iContact's customer service reps are.
• And yes, I've had a few complaints.

All in all, I learned a great deal and hopefully, so have my readers!  I do feel bad that I lost some subscribers.  It's likely, though, that if they didn't have the patience and understanding with my problem that they weren't all that interested anyway.  This brings up another opportunity for learning: whenever technology is involved I try to have a policy of patience and flexibility.  Yes, I made a mistake and yes, it would have been much better if iContact hadn't sent all the emails at once.  Stuff happens though.  Have you ever left a voicemail or an email and it wasn't returned to find out that something went wrong with the message?  Stuff happens! Email communications are misinterpreted ALL the time.  Stuff happens! Cars break down and the cell phone was left at home.  Stuff happens! Cell phones die, the email address was entered wrong, the phone number is incorrect, and.......sometimes we make human errors too.

Here's my point---part of being in a community and in relationship with people is the need for flexibility and, as I recently wrote in another blog, curiosity.  I SO appreciate Vickie, who ASKED me if there was a problem today. Heck, yeah!  But guess what?  A blog post was born and that's never a bad thing!

Do you have any stories of tech gone bad or flexible, curious people that have made your day?  If so, will you share them with us?

Say YES!

To your success,

Peg Stookey

About Peg

Peg is a passionate entrepreneur, wife and mother (of 4 kids and 3 dogs). She loves to write and to share what she's learning by working with business owners, as a parent, reading, training or general life experience. Through her blog she hopes to create discussion and to continue to learn as she also has the privilege of teaching! More than anything, she wishes for you to grab the brass ring and say YES! to success!