If you are using your autoresponder to sell a product
or service, you must be very careful as to how you
approach your potential customer. Few people like
a hard sale, and marketers have known for years
that in most cases, a prospect must hear your
message an average of seven times before they will
make a purchase. How do you accomplish this with
autoresponders?

It really quite simple, and in fact, the
autoresponders make getting the message to your
potential customers those seven times possible. On
the Internet, without the use of autoresponders, you
probably could not achieve that. Too often, marketers
make the mistake of literally slamming the potential
customer with a hard sales pitch with the first
autoresponder message ?this won?t work.

You build interest slowly. Start with an informative
message ?a message that educates the reader in
some way on the topic that your product or service
is related to. At the bottom of the message, include
a link to the sales page for your product. Use that
first message to focus on the problem that your
product or service can solve, with just a hint of the
solution.

Build up from there, moving into how your product or
service can solve a problem, and then with the next
message, ease into the benefits of your product ?
giving the reader more actual information with each
and every message. Your final message should be
the sale pitch ?not your first one! With each
message, make sure that you are giving the
customer information pertaining to the topic ?free
information! This is what will keep them interested
in what you have to say.

This type of marketing is an art. It may take time to
get it exactly right. Use the examples that other
marketers have set for you. Pay attention to the
messages that you receive from other marketers.
Start a ?swap?file, and keep those messages. Use
some of the better sales copy for your own
autoresponder messages ?just make sure that
yours doesn?t turn out to be an exact copy of
someo else?s sales message!

Remember not to start with a hard sale. Build your
potential customers interest. Keep building on what
the problem is, and how your product or service can
solve that problem or fill that need. If you are doing
this right, by the time the potential customer reads
the last message in that series, they will be
convinced enough to make a purchase!

Autoresponders are very necessary when it comes
to marketing or taking care of customers. But the
power of an autoresponder, or the lack of power,
can mean the difference between success and
failure.

When you use an autoresponder service, you must
make sure that the domain that the autoresponder
uses isn?t blacklisted by the spam watch groups. If
it is, your messages probably won?t make it past
the majority of spam filters, no matter how much
you check it with spam checkers.

Also, not having the ability to track responses can
cost you business. If you can?t track response rates,
you won?t have any way of knowing whether your
messages are doing you any good. A good
autoresponder will provide the ability to track
responses. If yours doesn?t, you might want to shop
for a new autoresponder.

The ability to add and remove names to your
autoresponder manually is vital. Often, people will
contact you without going through your
autoresponder. These people need to be put on the
autoresponders mailing list. If you are moving your
list from one service to another, you need the ability
to import names and addresses to your list. Again,
if your autoresponder service isn?t powerful enough
to allow this, look for a different one!

Your first option for a free autoresponder should be
the one that comes with your webhosting account ?
if you have a webhosting account. These
autoresponders can easily be set up through the
control panel of your website, and they do not
contain advertisements from the autoresponder
company or webhosting service. If you do not have
a hosting account, or your hosting
account does not include autoresponders, there are
other options that you can pursue.

There are many free autoresponder services to
choose from. These services are free, because the
company makes their money by placing a small
advertisement in each message that your
autoresponder sends out. These advertisements
may appear at the top of your auto responses, or at
the bottom, depending on which company you use.

Many paid autoresponder services offer a free version
as well. These free versions may or may not include
advertisements in the outgoing messages. These
lighter versions of the paid autoresponders typically
do not include many of the powerful features of the
paid versions. But if you don?t need the more
advanced features, this is a great choice.

Most free autoresponders have a limit on the number
of subscribers you can have. Many people start out
with the limited free versions, and then upgrade to
the paid versions once their lists are large enough
to exceed those limits. Many marketers don?t feel
that the expense of the autoresponder is warranted
until the list that they are building is turning a profit.
From a business standpoint, this makes sense.

As the owner of a business, you are the only one
who can decide whether you need a paid
autoresponder service, or if a free one will do the job.
If your list is small, a free autoresponder should do
everything that you need it to do, but as your list
grows, you should definitely consider upgrading.
However, having the small advertisements that the
free services place in the outgoing
messages may present a problem if the ads
compete with what you are trying to sell. They may
even pose a problem if they do not directly compete
with your product or business. Again, this depends
on what you are trying to accomplish with your
autoresponder.

Building customer interest and excitement is the first
step to successfully marketing many products.
Autoresponders play a vital role in building this
interest and excitement. For instance, if you were
developing an ebook, you may want to start telling
your website visitors and opt-in subscribers about it.
Start building interest; tell them what this product
will do for them, and how soon it will be available.

Do more than build interest by telling them about it.
Use an autoresponder to let them preview your
product! Even though you will be selling the product,
you can allow your potential customers to preview
the information. Have you ever seen previews for
movies that will be playing intheaters soon? It is the
same concept.

Load one chapter of the ebook into an autoresponder,
and put a form on your website where your visitors
can enter their name and email address to receive
the preview chapter free of charge. This gets their
name on your list of potential customer. Each
week, send a reminder email, letting them know how
close the release date is, and what they can expect
from your product ?keep building interest and
excitement.

Finally, a couple of days before you are ready to
launch your product offer those that received the
preview the option to buy a pre-release copy. You
canopt to offer a discounted price, or leave the price
as it will be on launch day ?the choice is yours.

Take a look at the list of people who signed up to
receive the preview. How many of them are still ?
subscribed?to that list? They?ve had the option to
stop receiving notices about your product, but they
chose to keep receiving the information you were
sending. These are highly targeted prospects for
your product. They have already shown you that
they have an interest in your product, and a large
number of those people are simply waiting on the
autoresponder broadcast message that will let
them know that it is time to pick up their copy of
your product!

Isn?t automation a wonderful thing? Using an
autoresponder, you are able to see how much of a
market there is for your product, and build a great
deal of interest in it before it is ever released. This
isthe key to making sales on launch day. Use
autoresponders to build the interest. Get your
prospects excited about what is about to come ?
andon launch day, give them what they are waiting
for andwatch the sales pour in!

An autoresponder can be set up to send out a
series of lessons for an email course. The lessons
can be set for distribution at specific intervals. You
determine how often the lessons for the course are
sent to the people who have signed up for it. Email
courses are very different from traditional courses,
web based courses, or any other type of course.

There is no student and instructor interaction. The
instructor writes the information out, puts each
lesson in an autoresponder series, sets the timing
for the lessons, and the rest is automated. You can
opt to have lessons delivered daily, every other day,
every three days, or any other time frame that you
think works best for your email students.

Email courses are commonly used to sell products
and services. For instance, if you sell widgets, you
might develop a course that teaches people how to
use widgets or how to care for their widget. Experts
agree that an email course can be written for
almost any product that you can imagine ?if you
put enough thought into it.

Start by determining what your course will be about,
and how long it should be. If the course should be
delivered every other day for two weeks, you know
that you would need seven lessons. Write the
lessons, and load them in the autoresponder. Set
the interval for each lesson, which in this case would
be 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13.

This means that the first lesson would be delivered
one day after the person has requested the course,
and the second lesson would be delivered three days
after the person has requested the course, and so
on. The interval for each lesson is set for the
number of days after the person has signed up
Make sure that everything is spelled right, and that
your sentences are grammatically correct. You
want the lessons to look and sound as professional
as possible.

Next, simply advertise the email address that will
activate the autoresponder. Make sure that you run
a test first, sending each lesson to yourself. This will
allow you to see what your email students will see
when they sign up!

If you have signed up with an autoresponder service,
you need to take the time to read the instructions to
learn how to use the service ?before you load the
first word of your first message! Not knowing how to
use the service will lead to many mistakes, and
your customers and potential customers will most
likely see every mistake you make!

As soon as you have complete the sign up process,
load one email address into the autoresponders
mailing list ?yours. If there is a manual or help file
for your autoresponder, read every word of it, and
really learn how to use all of the features of the
autoresponder.

Work with it, sending messages to your own address,
until you know your autoresponder service inside and
out! This may take a little time, but after a few hours
or so, you should know all that there is to know, and
you will be able to set your autoresponders up much
more effectively in the future. Taking the time to learn
now, will not only save time in the future, it may also
help you tweak and tune your autoresponder
messages and tracking in a way that increases your
responses!

Even college professors have found a use for
autoresponders. They can use them to remind
students about upcoming tests, or to deliver study
guides. Since the information in that professor
course is taught over and over again each time a
new class comes in, this saves the professor a
great deal of time.

Autoresponders are also used by colleges to remind
faculty and students about upcoming events.
Because events are scheduled in advance, these
autoresponder messages are set up in advance,
and nobody has to depend on a secretary to get
those notices out!

Many businesses use autoresponders to keep their
employees trained. When new equipment is brought
into the office, and employees need to know how to
operate it, an autoresponder can be set up with
training instructions.

No matter what kind of business you are in, there is
a way that autoresponders can be used. The use of
an autoresponder will save quite a bit of time, and it
can also serve to make the people in your
organization much for effective.

If the amounts invoiced are the same each month,
and due on the same day each week or month, you
can easily automate the invoicing process with the
use of an autoresponder. Many shopping carts that
have autoresponders built in work well for this.
Others may take a little time to set up, but in the
end, they will save a great deal of time overall.

Get extra usage out of the automated invoicing
process by adding small messages to the invoices
that alert these clients to new products or services
that you offer. Think about your phone bill ?doesn?t
your phone company send out additional sales
material with each bill? There is no reason you
shouldn?t use this same marketing technique with
your autoresponder invoices!

The easiest and fastest way to build up an email list is to give things away for free. Some marketers will tell you that this is a
waste of time ?and if you already have a list of one hundred thousand people that you can market to, then it probably is. But for
those who do not already have a list, this is the way that it gets built! You simply pay for advertisement to promote your freebie.
Don?t think of this as lost money, think of it as an investment in future earnings.

Give away an ezine, free reports, free ebooks, free access to private websites, or anything else that you can think of. The object is
to get people to sign up to receive that freebie, and to agree to receive email from you in the future! It is a win-win situation for
everyone, but you get more than anyone else in the deal. The person gets a freebie. You get their name and email address, and
permission to email them in the future.

But if you do it right, you get even more than that. The freebie that you give away should also be used to promote your products or
services. Even if it just has affiliate links for products or services that are related to the topic of the freebie, it is a way to generate
extra revenue. Then, when you send email in the future, you can again promote your products or services. Just be sure to include
valuable information in the email as well, or you will have people dropping off of your autoresponder mailing list like flies!

Using every opportunity that is presented to you in the world of Internet Marketing is vital to your success. You have the opportunity
to earn money in the freebie that you create, you have the opportunity to earn money when you send the ?thank you?email after a
person has requested your freebie, and you have the opportunity to earn money every time an autoresponder message is sent out
to that list in the future! Don?t waste those opportunities, and put it all in automatic mode with the use of an autoresponder.

These articles are commonly submitted to article
banks, websites, and ezine publishers. This is one
of the most effective ways to market a service or
product on the Internet, and it can become even more
effective when it is combined with the use of an
autoresponder.

Begin by setting each of your articles up in your
autoresponder. It is important that each article have
its very own autoresponder address, so you will
need an autoresponder service that will allow you to
do this. Next, make a master list of your articles, with
the autoresponder address for each article listed
beside the title. You can even add descriptions of the
articles on your master list if you want to.

Advertising your articles one at a time can take a
great deal of time?but advertising one autoresponder
address ?the one for the master list ?won?t take
very much time at all. Simply put it in your newsletter
and on your website. You can even allow other
ezine publishers to use this is a free resource for
their subscribers!