June’s sample size for the International Inspiration Index is larger than the previous two months, in part due to what I would like to consider a clever use of my email’s auto responder. Most people use their auto responder when they leave their office for awhile. We’ve all received those emails:

“I am out of my office until hell freezes over. I will check my email when I return. In the meantime…”

So, I thought, “Why not use the auto responder as a marketing tool even when I’m in town?”

I use it to promote something I consider important and since I get so much email in a day, it makes sense to broadcast to everyone who sends me email — including people I don’t know. I mean, after all, if I have message I want to get out, why not really get it “out there?”

So, I change my auto responder pretty regularly. In the latter half of June, I could see that the responses to the I3 were weaker than I wanted, so I turned on my auto responder and I set it up to broadcast to anyone who sent me an email. (My auto responder has an intelligent feature so it will only send you a reply once per week so my regular emailers will not get the same message over and over and over again. When I change the message, it resets the database.)

In the auto responder, I stated:

I’ll respond to your email as soon as I can. However, in the meantime, please help me with my long-term project by taking this survey: http://www.AttitudeIndex.com

Answer the 4 questions. It’s anonymous. It’s a survey on attitude. Please refer it to others also.

Thank you.

What happened?

That’s the cool thing. My survey responses really climbed. Also, because my survey’s closing page directs them to other web pages of mine, several people continued on to see what else I do and from that, several people signed up for my newsletter, including people I would have never thought of.

Social Networks Kick In and Spread the Message!

One of my good friends, Jess Pettit, is extremely active on Facebook. Because she speaks to colleges, she has a few thousand friends. She got the autoreply and forwarded it out to her network. That really kicked it into high gear! Normally, I’ll get one or two people a day who respond to my survey. The day Jess sent it out, I had 25.

I regularly change my auto responder now when I have a message I want to get out.