Wealthy Affiliate likes to follow the principle:

"Anything That Can Be Automated, Should Be!"

Fortunately for email marketers, automation is 100% possible and why email marketing is so powerful!

You do not have to manually collect and store email address to spreadsheets, know any secret programming techniques, or know how to create a form.

There are companies out there that provide turnkey services for you. They are appropriately called Autoresponders.

Here is the formal definition of an autoresponder (From Wikipedia):

An autoresponder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. They can be very simple or quite complex. Autoresponders are often used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to their prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals. Autoresponders are also incorporated into electronic mailing list software, to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.

Basically, an autoresponder automates every aspect of your email marketing campaigns. Everything from collection and storage and management of contacts, thank-you web page redirects, to the automated emails, subscriptions, email and reporting.

They really are miracle tools!

We use Aweber.com (along with many of the top marketers online). We recommend Aweber over any other autoresponder out there. Aweber provides top-notch support and if you are serious about starting an email marketing campaign, signing-up to their service is an absolute MUST!

Sign-up to Aweber (they offer a free trial)

**Note: Free autoresponders are not a solution. Most hosting companies offer some form of autoresponder within their packages, but DO NOT USE these. They not only offer limited functionality, email send rates are low and so are the automation abilities. Aweber will become your best friend and we suggest you get an account before you move onto the next lesson.

By now you should have an Aweber account set-up. To be honest with you, next to Wealthy Affiliate, this will be one of the best investments that you will ever make. Aweber is stable, their service is very consistent and it allows you to automate your entire email marketing campaigns so you can focus on building, testing, refining, and increase campaign profit. You can also fully automate your campaigns so they become completely hands off!

Some of the resources that you should quickly become accustomed to at Aweber are their help pages and their support links. Instead of us recreating what they have already created, we tend to like use existing Help tutorials and videos that are already available.

Here is where you will access the Aweber Help files and tutorials (known as their Knowledge Base):

http://www.aweber.com/faq/

Within the FAQ, you will be able to learn everything from how to set-up a new list, how send out broadcasts, how to analyze and download reports...everything within their system. We are not going to repeat this information, so we suggest that you spend a bit of time going through the system, playing around with it, setting up some different lists, etc. You will learn best like this and if you do get stuck, visit the FAQ page (mentioned above).

And to contact the Aweber support if you have any questions regarding your account or have technical questions:

http://www.aweber.com/contact-us.htm

We always preach that the best way to learn is through doing and the same goes for Aweber. The more you use the system, the more comfortable you become with it. Since this tutorial is about email marketing and not aweber, the remainder of the course is going to be outlining email marketing tactics.