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HTML email auto-responders are tools that are used in bulk email marketing to send out all kinds of automated email to subscribers. This is a tool that is familiar to all of us whenever we mistakenly send out an email to the wrong address and we get a bounce back report. These mails are usually in a plain text format but they can be in the HTML format as well. The HTML format is in fact more widely used in another form, for example when you send in a query to an entity and you receive an acknowledgment that the query is being processed.

In bulk email marketing the most common use of an auto-responder email is in the confirmation of subscriptions. This is a dual purpose technique of confirming a potential subscriber’s email address and also to ensure that if the confirmation email ends up in a junk email folder, the potential recipient digs the mail out of there into the inbox to work on it. This will ensure that all future emails end up in the inbox and not the spam or junk email folder, rendering the sender free of the spam filter.

There are a few considerations to bear in mind when creating an auto responder HTML email as below.

• Setting triggers. You automated response can be fired on any kind of a trigger. In bulk email marketing it is usually on confirmation of subscriptions or as an acknowledgment of action. Ensure that you correctly set the triggers because keeping too many trigger points will cause too many mails to go out to the customer. In addition, you could cause email back-scatter, which an ISP could end up mistaking for spam mail and this could result in you being blacklisted.

• Content. Ensure that the customer never feels like he or she is getting an automated mail. While most of the time one can guess which is an automated mail and which isn’t. It is a good idea to use some kind of personal, informal sounding message in the email to state the purpose of the email.

• Care in HTML coding. Just because you are using HTML, that doesn’t mean that you should insert fancy images and use css files that download over the net. The problem with this is that many email clients block the automatic download of elements from the net. Therefore, to avoid this problem, keep the HTML email formatting as basic as possible.

• Do not make the mistake of setting a trigger for every single activity where the client will try and contact you. Apart from the issue of back-scatter, there are certain activities that you must respond personally to and that the customer must never get the impression that he or she is talking to a machine. People transact over the net because of the convenience of it and they expect that same level of excellence and service from your customer service levels as well.

Jamie Colbs is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service. Author Links Business URL: http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/html-email-templates Business/Social Networking Links Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/benchmarkemail

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