Having the right autoresponder is essential!

How you obtain that list and how well it is managed will make or break a marketer.

The initial information that needs to be collected from clients or prospects, are the basics like name and email address.

Ideally you need to be able to automatically reply to the person wanting to join the list "signing up" and verify that they were in fact the person who sent the request to join. This process is called "double opt-in" and is vitally important for you to prove that you are not sending them. If you are accused of spamming you can face severe penalties. Double opt-in avoids that risk.

This is so important because for future campaigns you will need to send out emails to all the people on the list to market your products or services.

To handle this in any volume on your own becomes far more difficult as your list grows, but there are services called autoresponders on the Internet that will handle all of this for you.

There are both free and paid autoresponders. While "free' sounds good for a start up, the downside is the fact that free ones add a link to your messages, and sometimes place advertisements in the emails they send for you. This is nowhere near as professional as a message from a paid autoresponder service.

Many new internet marketers make the mistake of opting for a free autoresponder initially and then plan to change over to a paid one later. Those who do this you face the myriad of problems associated with converting their mailing list.

Typically an email would be sent to all subscribers telling them the you have moved to another list and they need to confirm again. While this is an individual's decision, it should be carefully researched before you make your decision.

It is wise to go with the more established services to avoid having to change later. Most services offer a free trial and plenty of educational material to tech you the best email straegies that will allow you to get the most from your campaigns.

Paid services also give you the ability to personalize your messages by client name or geographical location. This is worth gold to niche marketers.

Due to the high volume of clients, they are simple to set up, and have step by step instructions through the whole process.

There is no need to have knowledge of html, as you type all of your data by simply keying it in. The majority of online services convert your messages to html for you, automatically.

With autoresponders you can have your follow up emails or newsletters prepared in advance and sent automatically at times nominated by you.

Other features paid services have are spam checking tools and click through opening rate tracking.

The biggest reason of all to go with a large service is the delivery rate. If you run an autoresponder on your own server you will end up getting your IP blocked by many ISP's and your message deliveries will be lower.

There is no doubt that using free autoresponders is false economy if you are planning to build and manage a substantial client list.