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Autoresponders:
A Internet Businessman's Best Friend!
By: John Knowles
For those of you who don't know what an autoresponder is, an autoresponder is a tool for staying in contact with hundreds and thousands of people with little to no effort. Now this is definitely an oversimplification of the power and beauty of a good autoresponder. I know it is very easy to send an email to 5 or 10 people, but lets say that you have been very busy and very successful and have hundreds of people on your list. How would you like to send over a thousand individual emails? Doesn't sound like fun does it?
The better autoresponder services give you an easy way to set up a name and email capture form. You can literally drag and drop entry fields and type text into your capture form and click a button or two and get the HTML code to drop into your web page. You don't need to know HTML at all to build a name capture form. Further, the more sophisticated autoresponder services let you choose from a wide variety of styles and form presentation options.
When a lead(prospective customer) enters his/her name and email address into your form, the script that is invoked by the autoresponder stores the information as another entry on your list. You should also be able to easily display the names and email addresses on your list, via a report screen provided by the autoresponder service. In fact, there should be a wide variety of reports available to help you track the growth of your list and to see how frequently leads leave your list.
The idea of collecting these “leads” is to build a list of people you can send all kinds of follow up communications, from various product offers to just a “Thank You.” All of these messages can be written one time, stored with your autoresponder service, and sent automatically on any schedule you set up.
The beauty behind the autoresponder is that it eliminates all of the manual management that is otherwise necessary for running and managing an email campaign, or multiple campaigns. Therefore you can spend your time focusing on more important areas of your business, and making more constructive use of both your time and energy.
Now, there are several autoresponder services out there. Of course there are good ones and bad ones. I have been using Aweber for awhile now, and have been very happy with them. Aweber is reliable, fast, reasonably priced, and the support staff is very responsive whenever I ask a question. There's a bunch of tutorial material available on their site too.
I hope you have found this information to be helpful. So, get out there, get some leads, build your list and build your business.
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