While you may think you don't need one to start if you are planning on any type of website or promotion etc that requires you to provide further information they soon become a necessity.
With the spam laws being what they are (and for good reason) most autoresponders have a double opt-in confirmation requirement; meaning that if someone joins up to your newsletter or ezine etc. by entering their email address they will receive a response asking to confirm they truly want to receive that information. They will also have an unsubscribe message, or link to an unsubscribe page, somewhere within each email that is sent out. Again this is to comply with the spam laws, it gives all recipients that chance to opt-out of receiving further emails at any time.
What this means to you and your work from home business is that once you have multiple people asking for more information, wanting to join your regular announcement lists etc. your ISP won’t start complaining about you bulk mailing and you will be in compliance with the spam laws. It would be a shame to do all that work only to lose your ISP because you have been accused of spamming.
Once you’ve decided on your autoresponder it’s simply a matter of setting it up: if you want it to send out a set of instructional email courses you’d simply add your messages in and set what type of delay you want them to sent at. If you use them for announcements you simply choose who is to receive the emails, set your message and it does it all for you. There are a lot of advantages to using an autoresponder it’s simply a matter of finding which one suits your needs.
For the NZPCS Program we use GetResponse and I've not only found that very easy to implement, it has both a free and paid facility.
