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Creating, building, and maintaining an opt-in email list is an ongoing process which pays dividends to those who are diligent and determined.  As most small business owners know, return customers are where the real money is made, so keeping these important clients up to date and included in your company’s new offers, services, and news will help assure that they return again and again to buy from you.  Autoresponders are incredibly efficient and useful tools to help small businesses build and maintain contact with their opt-in lists, so choosing the right autoresponder for your business is key.

Four companies–Aweber, GetResponse, ConstantContact, and VerticalResponse–offer packages for turning visitors into clients, customers into return buyers, autoresponders to help businesses get their e-publications into the inboxes and onto the screens of the people who are supposed to see them.  Self-publishing is a terrific way to promote yourself as an expert in a certain industry, and having a newsletter, ezine, or other regular publication to send out shows that, not only do you understand your market fully, but that you are an industry leader able to analyze and discuss the emerging topics relative to your business.

Developing a marketing strategy to build your opt-in list requires a good deal of thought and planning.  After all, why should people sign up for your mailings?  Most people get more mail in their inbox than they read anyway, so why should they ask for more from you?  There are plenty of strategies for getting sign-ups–giveaways, contests, games, or just sales–but whatever method you do decide to use, employing the services of a company to manage your campaign will well be worth the time and money spent.

In the beginning days of internet marketing, solutions for opt-in list building, newsletter creation, analytics, and other ways to increase and manage traffic, consisted of having to use several different software platforms, and to create layouts and templates from scratch.  Now, companies like Aweber, ConstantContact, GetResponse, and VerticalResponse offer inclusive packages which allow clients to pay a monthly subscription fee which allows them the ability to run their online marketing campaigns from a single platform.

Although each company offers slightly different models, customers can be assured that by signing up they will be able to create top notch deliverables, by using templates for creating newsletters and professional marketing emails, sign-up boxes to help turn visitors into customers, web analytics to track your campaign performance, and autoresponders to make sure that what you send is delivered.  In addition, companies like VerticalResponse offers a bridge between online marketing and real-world direct selling, by offering a postcard creation service, which allows users to design postcards with their system.  Using your own list, VerticalResponse will create and send the cards themselves.  What could be more efficient?

A quick Google search will return favorable reviews for all of these companies, but Aweber has positioned itself as the market leader.  From a very reasonable price, to excellent customer service, Aweber can help businesses of all sizes become more successful and profitable.  If you’ve never used a service like this before, don’t worry.  Aweber is renowned for it’s intuitive control panels, helpful service, and has recently added flash tutorials to help newcomers get up to speed on implementing the tools.

Before employing the services of any of these companies, it’s important to have a clear, strong plan in place to build, grow, and maintain your opt-in lists.  While employing professional list management is important in and of itself, it’s up to each individual business to position themselves for success, and create informative and useful newsletters and emails for the clients on their lists.