Auto-responders are used widely by marketers these days. Aweber is a predominant service and one we’ve used on all our sites for several years. This review will give you a basic overview of it’s strengths and weaknesses.  Three good things about Aweber: it’s fairly cheap, easy to use, and can be implemented into your website to start collecting leads and sending out messages within about an hour. That’s essential these days as no one wants a service with a high learning curve.

You don’t have an auto-responder service? Stop reading this article right now and go and get one.

Yes, they can be that crucial for your success. They capture information from visitors to your site and this info gets sent right to you (great, huh?) Your visitors fill out a little form (usually to get a free report or ezine packed full of your special secrets) and you get their precious info to keep marketing to them.

The trick to using this system well is to make sure your forms are well-designed and easy to fill out. A long, convoluted form is a sure way to drive away prospects. Keep it short and sweet and make your free offer enticing and you’ll get lots of sign ups pretty quickly.

Tip #2: Your sign-ups will expect your messages so make sure you have them written and ready to send. The auto-responder will send them automatically however frequently you choose, so this makes it a little gem of a service and one you need to put to use.

A note about how often to send messages to your new prospects: Don’t send messages to them daily or you’ll get a lot of unsubscribes (who likes a pest?). Unsubscribes are those prospects who decide they don’t want to receive your messages any more and they opt-out of receiving any additional messages.

We generally like Aweber. It has worked well for us in particular. There are other services out there (and some that offer some pretty cool little forms like stickey notes, etc. that we haven’t seen yet with Aweber). Our main complaint is that it takes forever to load new messages, even on our high speed computer. It’s something that is a turn-off, but we don’t do it that often so it’s easy to overlook. We’d really like to see this issue addressed as well as some new interesting form choices.

Generally, it’s a good choice. This service has been around awhile and they perform as promised, so we don’t really have much to complain about. If they work on those slow load times, we might be just a little more enthusiastic, but we feel you cannot go wrong by using this service.