A majority of those who visit a new website have no intention of purchasing anything.  Most of the time, those who visit new sites are surfing the Internet for information, and happen to stumble across your website.  There are a few impulse buyers out there though, buyers that will buy from your site on the first visit.  Although most visitors will leave without buying anything, you'll find yourself wondering why your visitor counter keeps increasing and your sales aren't improving.

In most cases, it takes several exposures to new products or services before someone will decide to buy it.  To get the most from your sales and capitalize on visitors who happen to visit your site without making a purchase, you'll need a way to follow up with your visitors several times.  An email list is one way to do it, as you can show your product to the same market as many times as you like.

To successfully manage an email subscriber list, you'll need something known as an autoresponder.  An autoresponder is a great asset to your website, as it can handle virtually any email you receive.  You can think of these tools as salesmen who never get sick and are always there to answer emails 24 hours a day - 7 days a week.  They will also follow up with your clients when you instruct them to do so, continuing to add information to your database as well.

Autoresponders are very helpful tools that people can subscribe to.  It can also capture and manage email databases that it collects from your website traffic as well.  Once you have signed into your autoresponder account, you can use a sign up form and capture both the name and email address for any of your website visitors.  Once you have the information, you can add it to your customer list so that you can get back to the customer with information about your services and products.

There are many other uses for autoresponders as well.  Along with sending out personalized emails to your clients, you can also send them free examples of your products, snippets of useful information, or special offers towards your products.  You can add virtually anything you want to an autoresponder, and send it out when you wish.  You can also send out a broadcast message to everyone on your customer list at the same time, which will get your information out there and save you a lot of time.

You can get an autoresponder program for your website in several types and several locations.  You can get scripts to add to your website, although they aren't normally recommended.  Many prefer to go with third party services, which will operate the autoresponder for you.  This type of autoresponder is known as remote hosted, and proves to be very beneficial for those who don't want to operate the autoresponder themselves.

If you want to run the autoresponder yourself, you can always go with locally hosted autoresponder programs.  These programs will allow you to run the responder yourself, giving you complete and total control.  To do it this way, you'll need to buy an autoresponder program then set it up either on your computer or through your website. 

To get started in the right direction, all you need to do is find yourself an autoresponder.  To find one, all you need to do is run a search with a search engine such as Google.  You'll receive hundreds of different results, including free programs.  You should always avoid free autoresponders though - as programs that you pay for will give you a lot more in return.