Professionalism, Branding and client contact are key elements in a successful on line business.
Every time a prospective client visits your website, requests more information or receives a follow up email message from you they are making a judgment about your professionalism and integrity.

While your website can be likened to a shop front window, it is your autoresponder that is your key sales person. It is an accepted fact that most people may take five or six visits to a website before they make a decision to buy.

A well written informative email series that contains links back to your sales page is a great means of getting prospective clients to revisit your site.

It is therefore essential that you have a reliable autoresponder service that has high deliverability rates, doesn't carry ads, and has the flexibility to allow you to bransd your newsletter with HTML header sand footers.

Free autoresponders largely fail on all three fronts.

Deliverability rates are generally very low, as the servers in many cases have been listed as known spam sites by major email services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Quality autoresponder services like Get Response & AWeber pride themselves on deliverability rates of close to 99% and they jealously guard their deliverability rates, ensuring that emails can only be delivered to double opt-in subscribers.

Many Free advertising services carry ads within the email message, this is confuses the reader and makes it harder to get your message across consistently. It also sends a message to the reader that you don't take your message seriously enough to spend a small monthly fee on a professional email service.

Which leads us to the third reason not to use a free autoresponder - branding. Free Autoresponders essentially brand you as a cheapskate, somebody who won't take the time to brand yourself as a serious professional. Quality Autoresponder services allow you to personalize and design your messages so that you can appear unique to your readers.

If you're serious about running an on line business you need a quality autoresponder. It will get the message through and brand you as a professional.