As you may already know, I make pretty good use of auto-responders. I don’t recall exactly where I first learned the value of having machines do your work for you but I can tell you that after living off the power grid for 4 years and hauling water by hand, I LOVE the modern age of machinery.

I especially love it when it comes to marketing. The use of a good e-mail auto-responder (AR) saves you the tedium of having to respond to every little thing in person. The ways in which AR’s can be used are just about endless.

The trouble is that some people feel that sending an automated message will not be received as well as sending a personal note. This may be true. Some people may be as turned off by an AR message in the same way other people are turned off by answering machines.

While some marketers may see this as a problem, I feel it is a good thing. I really don’t want everyone’s business. The type of client that will make a snap judgment based exclusively on the fact that my message wasn’t hand crafted for his or her personal enjoyment is likely to be the kind of client I would prefer not to have in the first place.

Let’s face it honestly… there are both good AND bad clients.

And this brings me around (finally) to my thought for today. I decided to run a test. In the opening line of one of my AR messages I came right out and say “YES, this IS and automated reply to….” My thinking is that people are smart enough to realize it is a template reply.

Why hide it?

If I address the fact right up front, then the objection is handled and the reader doesn’t ever need to feel tricked into reading further. They either made a snap judgment and hit delete or they kept reading based on their own choice.

And you know what? People seem to like it. In the test run, at last count, I had a click through rate of 19.73%. Almost double my previous rate. Not too shabby!

(Update) The final CTR for this test was 28.7%!

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