New webmasters, following advice that's often repeated (for good reason), frequently want to set up an email list ("the money's in list") and an autoresponder ("potential customers must see your message an average of 7 times before they act"). But marketing forums are still full of questions from new marketers about autoresponders, so perhaps it's time to revisit that topic.

First, we need to make a distinction. Many hosting providers include unlimited autoresponders as part of their hosting plans. These however, are usually one-time autoresponders, meaning a user sends an email to that address, and they get one email back. These have their place - to send download instructions, answer standard support questions, provide additional company information, and so on.

Generally, forum discussions center around "follow-up" autoresponders, which not only send a single email in response to a user email, but also send additional email to that user at designated time intervals that marketer can set. No matter when user sends original email, they will receive each email from autoresponder in sequence. Therefore, on same day, some users may receive email number 3, while others receive email no 6.

Most autoresponder software will also function as email list software, meaning that you can send an email to your entire list at any time. If you only want a mailing list without followup capabilities, other software is available that serves only that purpose. However, it often makes more sense to choose full autoresponder software anyway. If you want, you can use autoresponder only to send occasional email to your list, but you'll have autoresponder capability should you need it in future.