It's inevitable. We are so completely bombarded with information every day that we forget. We forget about our customers, we forget about our prospects, we procrastinate... Heck, I even forget to have lunch most of the time, too bad my Aweber autoresponder doesn't remind me...

If you've ever taken the time to read even the most basic of sales or marketing books, surely it was hammered into your head that you need repetition and follow up to make a sale. If you've never heard that, or don't believe it enough to apply it, here's what you're missing out on: MONEY and lots of it.

In marketing, the key is repetition. There seems to be no general consensus on how many exposures is optimal but most figures seem to indicate that it is between 7 and 15. Its not a conscious thing really, it all goes on behind the scenes, your brain starts to recognize the image or the logo, gets intrigued by something that looks familiar, you read the ad for the first time even though you've already seen it 7 times. A couple of days later you see it again, and your brain, that uncooperative freethinker has some ideas of its own: you buy the product...

If sales are your specialty, then folks like Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy have hammered it into your brain: follow up, follow up, and follow up. The following applies less online than in the real world but it's important to define your sales process and work on it constantly. I aim for something along the lines of this. Initial contact, information gathering (harder online, replaced by benefits selling), proposal, close (online, you want to propose a lot and the ABC rule sure does apply, Always Be Closing, that is).

What does this all ad up to? You need the services of a good autoresponder. What will that little beast do for you? For one it will provide you with easy web forms that you place on your site. The forms can gather emails only or just about any other info you want. You take one of these simple forms and paste it on your site. When someone enters their email address there, they are automatically entered into your autoresponder database.

You will have written up a sequence of messages that your autoresponder will send to the prospect at desired intervals. So say your best sales process is 7 contacts. You write up 7 different emails that the autoresponder will deliver once per day, or whatever you choose, again and again to your prospects on autopilot.

No forgetting, no waste of time, just perfect follow, right on the money every time. Add to that a delivery system that bypasses 99.5% of spam filters and you've got yourself a winner. If you ad the name field to the form that you have your prospects fill in on your site, Aweber will automatically ad it to your emails where you specify it, so your emails will have a nice «Hi Alex» custom feel to them.

Unless your list is bigger than 10,000 names, it will cost you a maximum of $19.95 to get this little beauty working for you. The part of the service I have just described is just one of the many, many benefits you will find to using this software.

So is this an important part of online marketing? Actually its more like the foundation than just a part. It falls in the «essential, cannot be ignored at any cost» category and will pay for itself many, many times over. Go have a look for yourself here