Auto-responders such as AWeber and MailChimp can be a great way to first make contact with a customer, stay in touch over time and keep them informed about what’s happening in your company. These sites offer attractive features:

• They make building trust and confidence between the customer and your brand easy
• Emails can be customized for each recipient
• You can include copy of your message plus any supplemental downloads
• Scheduling auto-responders means you don’t even need to send the email yourself

This all sounds pretty great, right? So why not use an auto-responder to deliver a free e-course? If all you’re looking to do is provide regularly delivered content to your potential customers, then sure. But if you’re looking to build a community and encourage conversion, you should be using ruzuku.

Build Community

Ruzuku provides a destination where you can actually interact with your users. At the start of every step, your students will get an email from you outlining the activities for the step. So, not only are your customers getting regular reminders from you, but you’re also able to break down the content into more manageable chunks, so your potential customers don’t feel overwhelmed.

What’s more, ruzuku is designed around community interaction. Ruzuku discussions make it easy for people to talk about your lessons, ask questions and post additional resources. Not only can you provide a more hands-on experience for your potential customers (building a stronger relationship leads to higher conversion!), it also creates opportunity for your customers to help each other.

And just like auto-responders, you get to decide when content is available to participants and what attachments (video, audio, slideshows or documents for download) your students can access. But more than that, ruzuku also shows you how people are interacting with your content and with each other — something auto-responders can’t do.

Measuring Engagement

Auto-responders are great for reaching a large number of people. But what they don’t tell you is how people are interacting with your content. Someone could open up an auto-responder email, then delete it immediately, and programs like AWeber and MailChimp would still count these as “Opens” — leading you to inaccurately believe people are engaging with your material.

Ruzuku provides a Course Health page so you can see how participants are progressing through your course.

Health bars monitor when students complete an activity by checking it off. In addition to the content engagement, ruzuku also provides insight into your students interactions as measured by their Participation Score, which is a combination of Posts, Responses, and Comments. With all this rich information, you can easily see how engaged your customers are and make changes to content as necessary.

The Bottom Line

Auto-responders can be helpful in starting the relationship with your customers, but they fail to create a lasting connection with your students. With ruzuku, though, you get the opportunity to engage potential customers by building richer relationships that lead to higher conversions than simple auto-responders.