Most everyone can relate to the never ending stream of email that makes you feel like you're buried under a giant pile of busywork, never able to get to the important things that grow your business. If this sounds like you, then read on, friend.

Think about it...if the limited hours in your day constantly go to rote responses to email, your business will never thrive, never grow, and you will burn out quickly. Welcome to the wonderful world of autoresponders. Autoresponders are programs that send your routine emails automatically.

Autoresponders have numerous advantages other than just simplifying your day, although that is an important reason in and of itself. Some examples of other uses include: sending info about your products, price lists, services or answering repeat questions. They are a great idea of for example, you want to offer visitors to your eBay store some kind of special bonus. This could be in the form of good advice or relevant articles. These are all innovative ways that you can use an autoresponder. One of my favorite ways to use autoresponders is to advertise my business and then have consistent follow up with customers who purchase my products.

You may be wondering how autoresponders actually work. These software programs vary. Depending on the software, they may either operate with your email account or run a web page form.

Some types of autoresponders do much more than send out standardized emails. You can use them to send out unlimited numbers or messages for follow-up and you can send these messages at user defined intervals of time. For example, let's say you have a promotion you want to tell your list about. You can send out a predetermined email each day for the upcoming week before your promotion. Most can even send them at the time of day you choose. Or perhaps for every customer who buys your product, you want to send them a follow-up email the day they make a purchase, an email about one of your other products about 4 days later and then follow up once more a week after that. Well, you can set your autoresponder on autopilot to do all this for you. The best part is that you can adjust this according to your business model.

Many companies offer free autoresponders. These are a great way to try one out to see if the advantages are compatible with your business. In fact, most web hosting companies offer them as a service free of charge for their clients. If this does not apply to your web hosting company, there are also many companies who charge a nominal fee for use of their autoresponder. The only catch is that you must attach an advertisement for their service to your emails.

The autoresponder I use most frequently is aWeber. You can learn more about the benefits of aWeber and see if it is a good fit with your business. Once you sign up for aWeber, you will get some instructions for how to set everything up and transfer your content into their autoresponder. It is hard to imagine a business that could not benefit from using an autoresponder such as aWeber in some way.

We all know what a great marketing tool email is for most businesses. It is efficient and super inexpensive. You can really take advantage of your email marketing by using targeted email addresses for different facets of your business. For example, use different email addresses for different contact requests your customers may have. You can use info@yourdomain.com for general questions about information or you can use sales@yourdomain.com for sales related inquiries. It also adds rapport in the minds of your customers to have one such as president@yourdomain.com. It helps your business to seem approachable and personal and also provides a direct contact for people.

Have you seen yet the potential benefits of autoresponders? They give you easier access to thousands of potential customers and are such an important tool for your marketing efforts. Think about it in terms of eBay sales. You usually come in contact with many different eBay visitors before making an actual sale. An autoresponder gives you the advantage of automating your marketing campaign to your eBay customers. That is just one small example of how an autoresponder can really advocate your business.

I have rarely seen a business that cannot benefit immensely from proper use of an autoresponder. From what I have seen in my own business and in interacting with other business owners, I truly believe that an autoresponder can greatly improve just about any real home business, or any business for that matter. Check out these creative and versatile ways that you can use autoresponders. Start using some of these tips and I guarantee that your profits and productivity will increase.

• Review a Product - You can write your own reviews of different media products. Some examples of things you can review are music, movies, books, ebooks, software, etc. After you write your review, just put the review in your autoresponder. Another idea for something you can review are affiliate programs. Write up your affiliate review and then ad a link to the affiliate's page in your autoresponder.
• Generate Mailing Lists - Write articles and then you can send your new articles to anyone who may be interested through your autoresponder. That way, if they want to publish your article in their own newsletter or website, they will have your most up to date content.
• Offer Free Reports- Giving out free reports helps potential clients get a solid idea of what kind of quality and services that you provide in your business. The key in offering free reports is that you must offer really useful information and you must not include a catch of any kind or you will most likely lose a potential client. A free report should be just what is says...FREE! Do not try to sell anything in these reports. If they like what you have to offer, you will have the opportunity to sell to that potential customer at a later time.
• Interactive Trivia Quizzes - A great way to get people interested and interacting on your website is to create some fun trivia questions and turn it into short quizzes that people will want to know the answers to. What you do is put the quiz up on your site and then put the answers in your autoresponder. In order to get the answer to the quiz, potential customers will have to sign up for your autoresponder. Another fun option is to create a contest and in a like fashion, have your visitors send their responses to you via autoresponder. You can have your autoresponder automatically send them an email confirmation of their entry.
• Secret web pages - You can set up secret or hidden web pages that you only link to through your autoresponder. For example, this is a great way to handle choice content that you reserve only for your affiliates. You might offer special articles, links, graphics for your affiliates. You just need to let your site visitors know that they can have this info and access to your affiliate page if they sign up for your autoresponder. In this way, you will get a great idea of people who might be interested in becoming an affiliate partner with you.
• Order Pages - When someone places an order from you, you can put a special request form on that order page for anyone who is interested in receiving special discounts or early bird offers on future items/services. This is especially helpful, because the people on this list are already your customers and are already interested in your goods and/or services.
• Links Pages - You can offer your visitors some really helpful information by giving them a list of links to other sites that you think are worth checking into. Your page of links ideally should have up to 50 links that are of particular interest to those checking out your website. It's a great idea to add a promotion for your products or services at the bottom of this page or at the top of this page.

Are you starting to see yet that there are hundreds of ways that you can really use an autoresponder? Get creative! Tweak your autoresponder for your business.

How many times have you been browsing on a website, considering purchasing something, when something around you distracts you from your purchase? You may or may not go back to thinking about what you were considering purchasing.  Most times, you probably don't go back to buy that item or service. If this is something that happens to you on occasion, you can be certain that it happens to your customers while they are contemplating buying your products as well. Bam! They are distracted and close out of your website, never to be seen again...unless...you have had the foresight to utilize an autoresponder to capture their name and email address.

People often think of autoresponders as simple programs that help you out with rote email questions.  However, autoresponders are much more versatile than that. One particular area that I make use of my autoresponder is in the area of my newsletters and articles. Here are some of my tips on how to use your autoresponder in this area of your business.

1. You can publish a newsletter about your business - An autoresponders of good quality will help you to manage any recurring subscriptions you may have as well as help you with your follow-up with those people who are interested in purchasing from you. By offering these interested prospects a recurring newsletter, you can keep them up to date about what you have to offer. In addition, sending out newsletters helps you increase your credibility and reputation in your area of expertise. It also helps to keep you in contact with potential and current clients. 
2. Offer a special "Affiliates Only" newsletter - You can use something like this to let your affiliates know of ways that they can partner with you to increase their affiliate commissions. This is extremely useful if you are offering a special promotion of some sort or if you have just launched a new product and need people to partner with you in getting the word out. These kinds of newsletters benefit both you and your affiliate partners.
3. Article distribution - It is a well-known internet business technique that writing articles and distributing them around the internet is a great way to increase your credibility in your particular business field. This technique also has the advantages of increasing your client base as well as bringing more traffic to your website through resource boxes, which provide a back link to your website. Articles can contain not only your resource box, which is a short bio of you, the author, but can also contain your autoresponder address. If, for example, you have written 40 articles, you can put each article on a separate account and then combine those accounts to create your master list of articles that has the title of each article, a brief summary of the article and the autoresponder address. Then all you do is promote your master list and you can easily distribute all of your articles.  In addition, you can include your reprint instructions so others who want to publish or use your article have the capability of doing so. 

There are so many more ways that you can utilize a good autoresponder with your articles and newsletters.  These are only a few ideas in one category of your business. 

In particular, if you have an online business, autoresponders can greatly help you improve your marketing and sales efforts. Even if you don't have a home internet business, check out these tips for using autoresponders to help improve your marketing. They can benefit almost any business.

• Put your sales process on automation - Ads are a tried and true method to insure repeat exposure to your message and thus generate more sales. When you place an ad, make sure to include your autoresponder address. In this way, a potential customer will be exposed to numerous marketing materials. The benefit of this is that is multiplies the chances you have of converting potential clients into repeat customers. Here's a great example of how this can work. If you are selling a product, such as a how-to ebook, try adding some testimonials about how great your ebook is on your autoresponder. Also, make sure to add a really informative and enticing description of your service or product in detail.
• Advertising - If for example you sell advertising on your ezine, newsletter or website, set your autoresponder to send out info on how people can place ads and the rates you are currently selling your space for. This is a great way to automatically remind people that you offer advertising space as well as automatically generate that info to key people. You can also have your autoresponder handle follow-up for this advertising as well as promote special offers you may have at any given time.
• Offer an course through email - You can offer an email course and set your autoresponder to send out a lesson each day, or however often you like. The most important thing to remember here is that you must have awesome, quality content. The content should do the selling for you and you should not include a sales pitch in your course. It's a great idea to have tips about different topics for each lesson letting your readers know how your product will benefit them. These should be tangible benefits.
• Free trial of your service or product - It's a great ida to let your potential clients have a sample of your product or service on a trial basis, whether that be some software, an ebook, a course, etc. You will soon realize that when you give people a taste of a great product, they will more than likely want some more and keep coming back for what you have to offer. When you give them a free trial, you get to capture their name and email so you can follow up with them to try to close the sale through your autoresponder.
• Reminder emails - After a visitor has completed your free mini-course, set your autoresponder to follow up with them to remind them about your products and services. This actually improves your chances at making a sale for those who are considering it, but are indecisive about taking the next step. These reminders are also great for promoting new services you have or new product launches as well as those of your affiliate programs.

There are more ways to use autoresponders than I can count. Use them to improve your sales and marketing, to make your website more fun and interactive, to streamline your email, to help answer routine questions, to make better use of your newsletter and articles and so much more! These are merely a few of my ideas to help get you started. If you've got some great idea of your own or have ways that you're currently using an autoresponder to improve your business, please let us know!