My painful story started in the beginning of January this year about choosing an autoresoponder service. But before I tell you the story, let me spend some time briefly discussing on what atuoresponders are in case of someone who is not familiar with.
Well, a self hosted autoresponder give you many flexibilities, you can import any lists you like without the subscribers notice but you may have certain issues as well. For example if many of your ex-subscribers complained to their ISP that you are spamming them, then the domain get eventually got blacklisted and what’s more many hosting provider also limit your ability of sending broadcast messages unless you get something like a VDS/VPS or dedicated level of their accounts. For some one who just started internet marketing, self hosted autoresponder in fact is NOT recommended.
At that moment, I was looking a better solution than Autoresponse Plus, so I tried Get response. The reasons that I tried Getresponse is simply their service is cheaper than Aweber. After a month of using Get response, I found they are ok, their user interface looks good but when compare to Aweber it basically a no match. As you can see in my resource page, Aweber provides a graphical representation of the statistic such as messages click through rate, open rates, leads growth rates etc. In the case of Getresponse they do have the statistic but they don’t have the graphs. When compare to easy to use, Aweber is superb! You can easily rearrange your follow up with a drop and pop style window while Getresponse, typically up and down arrows. So Aweber is really superb in this. The only draw back of Aweber is really their price. $19/m.o compare to Getresponse $17.95/m.o. Also Aweber charges you premium if you have more than 500 subscribers in your database. Extra $10 for 501-2500 subscribers, extra $30/m.o. if your subscribers base are 2501-5000, and $69 per month if you have 5001 – 10,000. In other words the more subscribers you get the more money you have to pay… This probably the only point that I don’t really like.
so if you really looking for an autoresponder, my first pick is Aweber, second Getresponse, third, none!
What is an autoresponder and how it can help your online business
When comes to online business or making money online, it is essential for you as an internet marketer to gather a database of visitors’ email addresses which you can send your offers and special promotions later once they opt-in into your database. One effective way to send your email newsletter or promotional offer will be the use of a software called autoresponder. It basically is a piece of computer program which helps to automate your email marketing campaign for example, you can automatically send a subscription confirmation email message to your site visitors once they opt-in to your list and you can also schedule the specified date you want to send your follow up messages to your subscribers which reduce the amount of work and time you have to do with the “autoresponder” which commonly bundled with your hosting account nowadays.Types of Autoresponder
If you search around the internet there are mainly two types of autoresponders: namely self hosted and third party services. I personally have tried both types and in fact I have tried 3 companies that provide the third party services and I am currently using a self hosted one on my own. Instead of telling you the standard boring benefits of those services that you may have already read in other review sites, I want to share with you my pain story on choosing a wrong company or services.My Pain Story
In January 2007, I decided to sign up an autoresponder service. You can say this is a milestone of my online business. I listened to many Internet Marketing gurus said, get my own list! At that time, I thought an autoresponder was actually quite expensive. I had already invested my money on a yearly reseller hosting account, a domain reseller account, and some Internet marketing ebooks which taught how to make money online. So an autoresponder service like Aweber and GetResponse seemed pricely for me. So what did I do? At that time, I remembered another Internet marketer which I was his subscriber at that time, recommend a cheaper service called Responsebot. Well that service got some basic functionality like message broadcasting, unlimited autoresponder accounts, messages click through rate tracking and the ability to schedule your follow up messages at a specified time. I thought those functions was going to be enough and in fact it was. What’s more Responsebot at that moment provided a life time opportunity with a sign up fee less than $70! Well indeed it was very affordable so I signed up.The Pain Begins
In the first 3 months of using responsebot service, I had no problem with it. Both my broadcast and follow up message were going through, my links were tracked so it was totally fine and I was happy with that. However, in the forth month problems started to happen. I found some of my new added accounts stop sending my pre-scheduled follow up messages. I knew that because Response bot had a stats counter telling me my newly added scheduled messages were not send through in those lists. (for some of you not familiar with autoresponder, for the names (e.g.Aweber, GetResponse, Responsebot) I have mentioned you can have unlimited email subscription lists. For each list you set up, there is an unique email accounts that you can associate it with. hence an account). I tried to contact the owners but I did not get any reply until the third time I sent him the support email. Unfortunately, his replied was really unhelpful. I mentioned in the email, I got such a such error where I also provided screen shot proofing there is something wrong with my main account in the system but he said something “like the problem could not be easily resolved because I could no longer get access to programmer” something like that. Well, to me this was a really bad response for that person. He left me hang in the half of the sky! I mean what’s good is an autoresponder if I could NOT scheduled my email follow up messages so that the system can send it automatically to my subscribers? He left me no choice but to abandon the use of Responsebot and immediately seek others services that I could use.Self Hosted Autoresponder
Well, I learned my pain lesson, don’t buy a so called affordable of cheap autoresponder services. They either deliver or they don’t. I couldn’t tell since I don’t know how to track the deliverablity rate. But what I can tell is their customer support services either acceptable or not that is! Simple as that. I later find Aweber is a quite a good customer support one which I will describe later. Ok the reason why I need a self hosted autoresponder was because at that time I had about 4xx-5xx subscribers, that is I need a service that allow me to import all of my subscribers without them to reconfirm. I learned that from some of my mentor that most internet users are lazy and they rather NOT to reconfirm, but the true fact is most third party autoresponder like Aweber and Getresponse doesn’t allow that. You may get away with Getresponse but certainly not Aweber. so I left no choice but bought a self hosted software. Fortunately enough I know Alvin Phang offers a Virtual Dedicated Hosting as a bonus after buying his make money blogging ebook named Atomic Blogging. So that the vendor could install the autoresponder software using that hosting account.Well, a self hosted autoresponder give you many flexibilities, you can import any lists you like without the subscribers notice but you may have certain issues as well. For example if many of your ex-subscribers complained to their ISP that you are spamming them, then the domain get eventually got blacklisted and what’s more many hosting provider also limit your ability of sending broadcast messages unless you get something like a VDS/VPS or dedicated level of their accounts. For some one who just started internet marketing, self hosted autoresponder in fact is NOT recommended.
Get Response
The reasons I tried a third party service such as Aweber and Getresponse are I was really not satisfied with the software I was using (that is Autoresponse Plus, in case you wish to know the name of the software). That responder was recommended by a mentor of mine. You cam host up to 10 different domains with RSS support, click through tracking, broadcast, email follow up that you normally have for a standard email autoresponder. Anyway, I wasn’t satisfied the service because I saw many subscribers did not confirm their subscription and also they lack of some good features such as a spam score on my protection outgoing messages. You know email deliverability is critical to your email campaign. Your message go through to your subscribers email inboxes or being caught up with the ISP’s spam filters are determined the score you have with your messages. With the Autoresponse plus solution, you don’t know your message spam score, so you can’t really tell if it arrives to your subscribers inbox or not. You may open up a new free email accounts such as MSN, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo Mail to test but this takes too much time and in fact why bother if there is a solution which easily tells you if your message arrived to subscribers inboxes or not.At that moment, I was looking a better solution than Autoresponse Plus, so I tried Get response. The reasons that I tried Getresponse is simply their service is cheaper than Aweber. After a month of using Get response, I found they are ok, their user interface looks good but when compare to Aweber it basically a no match. As you can see in my resource page, Aweber provides a graphical representation of the statistic such as messages click through rate, open rates, leads growth rates etc. In the case of Getresponse they do have the statistic but they don’t have the graphs. When compare to easy to use, Aweber is superb! You can easily rearrange your follow up with a drop and pop style window while Getresponse, typically up and down arrows. So Aweber is really superb in this. The only draw back of Aweber is really their price. $19/m.o compare to Getresponse $17.95/m.o. Also Aweber charges you premium if you have more than 500 subscribers in your database. Extra $10 for 501-2500 subscribers, extra $30/m.o. if your subscribers base are 2501-5000, and $69 per month if you have 5001 – 10,000. In other words the more subscribers you get the more money you have to pay… This probably the only point that I don’t really like.
so if you really looking for an autoresponder, my first pick is Aweber, second Getresponse, third, none!