Today’s businesses need to be accessible if they want to get ahead. Engaging with your customers, especially through personalized email, should be a top priority. After all, research by data-marketing firm Epsilon found that 80% of consumers indicate being more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences. If you’re trying to build meaningful relationships with your customers, you’re going to have to engage.

If you’re doing customer engagement right, chances are you’ll notice a few major benefits. Among them: more effective lead generation, better retention of existing customers, increased sales, and increased overall customer satisfaction. It can be a lot of work though to maintain high levels of engagement in your emails, especially when you have so many other marketing tasks to take care of. And that’s where email autoresponders come in.

Below, we’ll go over the basics of email autoresponders and why they’re such a big value-add. We’ll also give you examples of A+ auto-responses for some of the most common customer requests. Ready? Let’s get to it.

What is an email autoresponder?

An email autoresponder is a tool that allows you to send automatic replies to customer inquiries. Instead of sending a canned response because you’re strapped for time, autoresponders handle the inflow of requests for you, sending replies that sound hand-typed even if they’re not.

Ultimately, the biggest advantage of an email autoresponder is that it gives customers a personalized response (i.e., one that directly responds to their question, instead of just a general inquiry response) without requiring constant personal attention from your team. You can also set up email autoresponders to trigger after a customer completes a certain action, such as signing up for a demo or making a purchase.

As for how to actually word these all-important email autoresponder messages, here are three tips for making them shine.

Tip #1: Make Sure Your Personality Comes Through

The idea is for your autoresponder messages to sound like they were typed by a real person in real time. And to pull off the illusion, you need to make sure that you accurately capture your brand voice.

Let’s say you’re running marketing for a dog walking business, and you need an autoresponder message for when a potential client books an initial consult. Which do you think is more effective:

“Thank you for your interest. We will get back to you soon to schedule a consultation.”

OR

“We can’t wait to meet you and your furry friend! Stay tuned and we will be in touch as soon as paws-ible to schedule a meet and greet.”

With just a few more words (and in this case a pet-friendly pun, because of course), your message says a lot more about who you are. It also conveys excitement and appreciation — two factors that matter a lot when it comes to building strong relationships with new and existing clients.

Tip #2: Deliver On Your Promises

Your autoresponder replies should serve distinct purposes. And to that point, they need to offer concrete value to their recipients, usually in the form of providing information or an asset that’s directly related to the behavior that triggered the response in the first place.

For example, if you’re sending an autoresponder message in response to someone filling out a form for a free e-book, the message they get in reply should include the e-book link.

Think: “Here’s the e-book you asked for — we hope you enjoy it! Link”

Not: “Your e-book is on its way soon! Check your email later today so you don’t miss it.”

One example has exactly what the customer is looking for. The other one just has words. Make sure your autoresponder messages serve a distinct purpose and aren’t just adding fluff to your customer’s inbox — nobody wants that.

Tip #3: Highlight Other Value Assets

Use your email autoresponder as a way to draw more eyes to additional brand content and channels. As long as you integrate these assets organically, you can use your autoresponder messages as avenues for building traffic in other areas in addition to building engagement.

To illustrate, imagine that you’re marketing chatbot software for ecommerce stores and a potential customer filled out a demo request form on your website. Your autoresponder message could look something like this:

“We can’t wait to show you all that we have to offer! Follow this link to sign up for your demo. You’ll probably also like our Guide to Making Chatbots Work For Your Business.

Want to learn more about what we do? Check out our blog and give us a follow on Twitter and Instagram.”

In just four short sentences you will have driven more traffic to your web content and social media platforms, all while addressing the customer’s most direct needs.

It’s time to can those canned responses and get to work with engagement-driving, relationship-building email autoresponders.