Gmail Auto-responder to Giveaway Your Offers

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Gmail Canned Responses & Filter together!

You certainly understand the importance of occasional giveaways to the readers of your blog. I most needed it for my www.psexam.com to giveaway regular eBooks to the Computer Science Students. One way was to upload to the server and put a download link pointing to the file on server. But did not like to make ‘my hard worked precious eBooks’ that cheap to allow anybody download it and chew it for free! I am rather happy to provide it, only to them, who really need it and are interested in what I am offering.

Tried to use WordPress plug-in – MailPress! It was not good idea. Might be I don’t know much about the efficient use of MailPress, or MailPress does not provide options for this sort of task. I could manage to send an automated email to somebody who just subscribed, or who commented for the first time and the weekly newsletter I publish. But my requirement was bit different from any of these facilities. I wanted to notify my users when I have a new eBook, ready to download and allow only to them who respond the notice.

I could use cPanel AutoResponder. But I did not prefer. It consumes my monthly bandwidth. I need to operate from within 10G bandwidth for every month and if I started to send around 1900 notice emails and the download emails that ensues from them, I would starve of bandwidth resulting to more expenses. So, its bad idea for a poor webmaster like me.

You might remind me of cPanel Mailing List applications too! Yes, the reason to reject is similar and “My God I can’t manage them”. They are very complex for a simple blogger like me!

Aweber is there! Yes, I know, but I can’t spend money right now. Let me earn a lot first

Gmail’s Canned Response

It was there since October 2008 and I’m sure, there are still many who are completely unaware of this great handy tool! BTW it is still in Labs Feature.

WebWorkerDaily pointed out the use of Canned Responses as smart autoresponder:

What I love about Gmail’s canned responses is that unlike most autoresponder features from other free webmail providers, you don’t have to send the same automated email to everyone who sends you anything. By using canned responses hand-in-hand with Gmail’s filters, you can trigger Gmail to send out a specific response based on an incoming email’s keywords, who the the sender is, and other criteria.

How to use Gmail’s Canned Response as Smart Autoresponder?

Follow these steps I trailed on to set up your smart autoresponder to giveaway your offers to the blog readers who are really interested on what you have to.

Log on to your Gmail account. (I won’t tell you how )
Go to the Settings and then Labs.
Look for Canned Responses from the list and Enable it. Then, scroll down the page and ‘Save Changes’.
Great! the feature is enabled. Now its time to set up an email to respond automatically.
Go to the ‘Compose Mail’ and create a new mail as your response mail.” href=”http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/7ef6d94e-568a-442b-9c22-7683bd9f55ee/”>