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An autorepsonder is the most important piece of automation software you will use in your online business – so choose it with care.

Your autoresponder will exist at the very heart of your online business to:

• Capture the details of every prospect or potential customer
• Save details of products or services they are interested in on separate lists
• Allow individual details to be added to multiple related lists
• Prevent people repeatedly signing up to any list
• Automatically change people from prospect to buyer lists when the buy
• Manage both subscriber and un-subscriber actions
• Manage follow up responses such as thank you and action landing pages
• Automatically drip feed emails as people join each list
• Store records such as IP addresses with opt-in confirmation to protect you against complaints of spamming.
• Allow you to send single emails as broadcasts to one or more lists instantly
• Integrate with other Internet Marketing software
• Manage and monitor the deliverability of your emails – which ones get through and which ones get opened

As you can see that a bit more than just sending out a series of emails as soon as somebody enters their email details into one of your opt-in boxes.

When I bought my first hosting account and looked around my cPanel – I thought great, it comes with an autoresponder! But all it could do was respond to emails.

Hating to pay $ every month, I then decided to research and buy autoresponder software that I could use without needing to pay again.

I tried several packages, such as php Autoresponder and more recently the free wordpress plugin.
There is nothing wrong with this type of software and it is great if your plan is to work online as a hobby.
But they are not business strength solutions that you will need if you plan to make a living working online.

So what is the problem with using autoresponder software?
Unfortunately there are lots of problems that added together chip away to make it best avoided for use in real businesses:

• Software goes wrong from time to time and when it does you will need IT competent support to fix it (even if that is you!) – meanwhile your business will have stopped dead.
• All emails will be sent from your own hosting server. Many hosting accounts have strict limits about how many emails you can send every minute or hour.
• Your hosting account will quickly shut you down if there is any hint that you are connected with any spamming activities.
• You will not be able to export your lists of prospects or customers to managed autoresponder services. This is to protect themselves against accusations of spam.
• Features. I have not found any software that comes close to providing the number and quality of features you need to run your business profitably. Built in automation and templates supplied by autoresponder services can save you a ton of time wasted on repetitive tasks.
• No stand-alone package has yet become an industry standard open source option. So you will find that other Internet Marketing software has not been designed to integrate with it.

Yes, an autoresponder service is going to set you back $20 a month – so don’t sign up until you have all of your ducks in a row ready to start using it.
In other words – a hosting account, domain name and a product or service customers can buy.
Ideally choosing an autoresponder service should be part of your online business plan!