To answer those questions, we need to spend a little time looking at the fundamentals of selling on the Internet. If all you have is a home page to inform family and friends about the latest happenings and favorite recipes, you probably wouldn’t be here. I assume you are reading this e-book because you have hopes of selling something on the net, whether you plan to make a living from it or not.

Whatever else they may do there, in business terms they either buy or they don’t. Pretty basic. But here’s the most important fact you may ever learn about Internet business.

WHETHER THEY BUY OR NOT IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION ABOUT YOUR VISITORS!

WHETHER YOU HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CONVINCE THEM TO LEAVE THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS!

Here’s why: Only a small percentage of first time visitors will buy from you. If you haven’t done all you can to capture their email address so you can follow up with them, you are destined to spend all your efforts (and money) getting new visitors to your site in hopes that a few will buy. Sales statistics show that most prospects need to be exposed to an offer more than 7 times before they buy! You have no hopes of placing your product before a buyer 7 times unless he/she has agreed to leave his/her email address.

The idea here is not to ‘trick’ someone into leaving an email address. Your visitor expressed some interest in coming to your site in the first place; your job is to give him/her enough reason to want to hear more about what you have or will have in the future. The list of such e-mail addresses is called an “opt-in mail list” because each has opted-in by agreeing to give you an address and receive mailings from you. Don’t ever try to build lists of names unless each and every one agrees to be on your list. E-mail sent to someone who didn’t request it could be considered “spam” and is a major problem on the Internet. Don’t do it or you could lose your web site!! (Technically, an e-mail is spam only if you provide no means for the receiver to unsubscribe. However, many or most people will not be pleased to receive advertisements that they are not interested in and did not request.)

How do autoresponders fit in here? We will look at 3 fundamental factors.

Three Fundamental Factors

First, let me summarize the importance of the preceding paragraphs by stating 3 things that most successful Internet business owners say you must do:

1. Build an opt-in mail list.
2. Have a method to follow up your site visitors.
3. Mechanize your opt-in and follow-up processes.

Autoresponders are the heart and soul of all three!

Let’s look at each one and see how autoresponders fit.

The E-mail List

You will want to have an opt-in e-mail list sign-up form in a prominent place on your web site. That form will be connected to a program that stores those names and addresses. An autoresponder or an e-mail list program with autoresponder functions will usually be the program to fill that role. That is a major function of autoresponders – maintaining a list of all the email addresses it receives. As we saw previously, the address (and name, if available) of each e-mail received by an autoresponder is faithfully stored in its subscriber list.

The Follow-up Method

Follow-up means you have the means to contact your opt-in list. A list of names isn’t much good otherwise. Obviously the basic autoresponder function of responding to e-mail messages isn’t of much value here. We need a function that can send follow-up messages to addresses we already have. And that is one of the additional functions of a good autoresponder or an e-mail list program. It is often called the ‘broadcast’ function for obvious reasons – a message is broadcast to all the addresses in the list at once.

Mechanized Processes

We have just seen the way an autoresponder can send a single message to thousands of members of an opt-in list automatically. How is the opt-in process automated? There are commonly 3 ways of collecting the names and addresses without you having to manually enter them.

One is for your subscriber to simply send an email to your autoresponder address. Whether or not it is configured to send an instant message, the autoresponder faithfully records the address and the name (if known) for each e-mail message received at its address.

The second method is the form on your web site mentioned above. Almost all autoresponder suppliers supply a simple means to add this form so that addresses are recorded automatically in your opt-in list.

The third method is more sophisticated. Have you ever visited a web site and seen a box pop up which said something like “Click OK to subscribe to my Internet Marketing newsletter?” If you click OK, your email address will be automatically captured without you having to even enter it. Many autoresponder suppliers furnish the means for you to add this kind of pop-up opt-in box to your site.

The automation aspect of using autoresponders can hardly be over-emphasized. As an Internet business starts to grow, handling all the tasks involved becomes entirely unmanageable without automation, and autoresponders are at the heart of that process. If you are trying to build a business without effective use of autoresponders, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage compared to those marketers who do.