Very little has changed, the general consensus in offline/online marketing is that it can take 7 "touches" to bring in a sale. So to that end you should think about creating an autoresponder sequence with at least that many stages. Your initial communications should be very non-salesy, of course put your offer in towards the bottom for those emails so that hot leads and ready to go straight away.
Basically each mail should:
(a) give the impression that you are expert in what your talking about, and
(b) make the recipient feel they are being rewarded with some exclusive/insider knowledge,
A "newsletter" format works great here, above the fold put the unique/exclusive content, towards the bottom put your boiler plate offer. When you start to build a larger list you can segment the list and use A/B testing of different content/approaches/pricing to see which works better.