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Auto responders are the electronic version of Talking House, An information box outside your listing, fax-on-demand or anything else Realtors use to pass information along to their customers. You can think of autoresponders as your electronic assistant working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

What is an autoresponder?

Autoresponder is an e-mail address.

Autoresponder is also an automated function with which you can send Initial and Follow-up Messages to your Customers. In addition, Autoresponder gathers and reports to you all the email addresses of the messages it has received.

Instead of your personally having to reply to each and every inquiry about your service or product, sending out sales letters and thank you letters, etc., you can set up an autoresponder to do all this for you. This way you save your valuable time for those promotional activities that really do need your personal attention.

Apart from saving time autoresponders provide prompt responses. As most of you know, the Internet consumer wants immediate and accurate information.

How does all this applies to real estate?

• Property Listings: Set up an information autoresponder for every one of your listings, so when the potential buyer hits your website you can automatically provide them with information on your listing.
• Personal email: Set up an autoresponder on your own personal email so that you can acknowledge someone's message. Or, if you are on vacation, you can inform people that you will get back to them on such & such date, or you can direct them to whoever is covering for you during your absence.
• Electronic newsletter: Let people subscribe to your electronic newsletter, where they will automatically receive the last issue, or all previous issues.

Preparing Your Information

Prepare your information in text format (ASCII). If using a word processor, save in text format. It is recommended to keep information less than 10k in size (10,240 characters), but larger files are acceptable. Even though some autoresponders can handle larger files, some e-mail services and users systems block larger files, or require downloading as attachments. If a user has to work too hard to receive your information, they may not bother.

• If you have a lot of information, you may want to consider multiple responders.
• Format the text to be no wider than 70 characters (preferably 55 characters or less).
• This will avoid word-wrapping problems and will be easier to view on the user's system.

Where can you get this service?

Your hosting company usually sets up autoresponders and you should look into it. If your internet service provider does not provide this service, there are companies that will provide the service for a fee.

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