What engages your audience is a consistent connection. It is difficult to keep up the communication stream with each individual person who might sign up on your website and blog.
Auto Responders are designed to keep up the communications automatically. As soon as someone signs up on your capture page, you can have your Auto Responder immediately send a thank you message. Then the next day it can send a message that is informational, details about what you do or even a link to an mp3 file or an ebook.
The rule of thump is to set up at least seven Auto Responders before you ask them to buy something. All the while it’s done in the background without any intervention from you.
I use icontact to capture names and email addresses. It’s designed to be extremely easy to use and is less expensive than most of the other database capture and email sending sites.