Do you have customers or clients that you want to have contact with on a regularly recurring basis?

For example, do you see the same clients once a year?

Here are some examples:

• An car garage notifies its customers by email every 3 months to remind them to get an oil change
• A dentist emails every 6 months to have people schedule their teeth cleaning
• A Hotel recontacts people 11 months after their last stay to remind them to book again for this year

Here is an extremely simple way to have your contact with these customers to happen automatically. You are likely to see a strong increase in followup/repeat visits because of it.

You can set it up so that your customers are automatically notified by email after a predetermined time period.

It is all done very simply with an autoresponder account.

Put simply, an autoresponder is an email address that some submits their name and email address to. Any addresses that are collected are automatically sent an email at predetermined times with what ever message they are programmed to send.

Let's use the dentist office as an example.

Upon finishing their checkup, the patient is asked by the receptionist:

"We would love to be able to automatically notify you of your next teeth cleaning. Do you happen to have an email account?"

After getting the email address, the receptionist can go online to a special web page on their site. Note, this web page is not for the public so there is not a link to it from any of the other pages.

The receptionist goes to their page such as: myfamilydentist.com/reminder

On the reminder page, the only thing for the receptionist to do is type in their name, email address and press

This page will send this information to the autoresponder. The autoresponder will instantly send a message to that email address. It could be something such as:

"Dear Julie,

This is Dr. Patterson's office just letting you know that you will receive an email from us when your next teeth cleaning is due.

As always, if you need us for anything please give us a call at xxx xxx-xxxx or visit our web site at myfamilydentist.com

Best wishes Julie and see you in six months!"

Now The GOOD Part

When you set up a customer in the autoresponder account they will get two emails from you.

The first one will immediately send them an email letting them know they will be getting a reminder from you in the future.

In addition to the initial email your customer gets, they get another one. This one is however many days later you want it to be.

In the case of a dentist, they may want to remind someone two weeks before their 6 month appointment is due.

So you set it for 180 days. (6 months x 30 days in a month = 180 days).

Now take away 2 weeks before the six months is due so you get 180 days - 14 days = 166 days.

You set up your autoresponder to give them a second message 166 days after the first. This message can say something like:

"Hi Julie,

This is Dr. Patterson's office again. As promised, we wanted to remind you that you are due for your 6 month teeth cleaning. Since good dental hygeniene is so important for healthy teeth, we know that most people want to get a regular cleaning.

If you want, you can schedule your appointment right now. You can call us at xxx xxx-xxxx or let us know what days you are interested in coming in...." etc.

You could even have them reply via email for them to request an appointment if appropriate.

How Much Will This Cost?

Not a lot! One of the best autoresponder services you can subscribe to is Aweber.

This is the service that I use for several of my accounts and the minimal investment pays for itself many times over every month. Right now it is under $20 a month and well worth it.

The fantastic thing about this service is that one small fee provides an unlimited number of accounts.

Most small businesses will recover the low cost of an autoresponder with only 1 extra sale generated through it. My experience has shown that they are without any doubt worth the small investment.

The question for you is: isn't there some service or reminder that you can give your customers after a period of time to regenerate business from them?

If so, then an autoresponder system is a simple and extremely cost effective way to do it.