Autoresponder Selection - And Our Recommendation
As we explained in our previous post, autoresponders are indeed any online or offline business;s best friend. 
OK, but how do you go about getting started in your Email marketing journey? I have bad and good news. The bad new first - it’s not that easy actually and there are some key decisions you will need to make to make sure you do this right. The good news will come at the end of the article.
Autoreponders come in three flavors depending on who sends out the email.
Desktop Based: You buy a software that installs on your desktop, just like your Office softwre. This inclues Mailoop and PrimaSoft. With these, the email is sent out via your chosen ISP - usually your high speed internet provider such as Cox or Comcast. These are good if your email list is small - few hundreds at the most. If your email list is in the thousands, then you are asking for trouble if you adopt this type of software, unless you are super careful. The problem starts with some subscribers of your mailing list using the “This is Spam” buttons on their emails instead of cleanly unsubscribing from your email list using the unsubscribe link. Once your ISP sees a lot of these spam complaints, they just stop sending your emails or notify you that you need to stop sending your emails and you are pretty much stuck at that point.Most ISP’s limit the number of email that you can send out at once. This is usually limited to a few hundred emails. ISP’s also do not offer much of a service guarantee for your email delivery like some of the hosted solutions do.
Server-based: These are basically software or scripts that you install on your website space. Now the email goes out from your hosting provider’s servers, not your ISP. Leading providers are AutoResponse Plus and phpList (Free). In this case as well, you run into similar issues. Hosting providers have a limit of the number of emails you can send out. This is either a per day or per hour limit. Site5.com for instance has a 500 emails per hour limit and SiteGround.Com has a 400 emails per hour limit. There are some others that are more generous. Third Sphere Hosting, for example, allows 20,000 emails per day, but that’s unusual. Now 500 per hour might sound like a lot to you. But really, over time, it’s easy to get into lists that are in the thousands. Just offer a freebie on your website worth a couple of hundred dollars and you could have a few hundred subscribers overnight. That can be good and bad though. On one hand , you have a list of potential buyers now but on the other hand, a lot of those people will never really buy from you but are there just for the freebies. You really can’t do anything about that problem though. Everyone involved with Email faces that issue. You will have to send email to all your list subscribers at least initially before you can segment them into ones that are VIP’s for you and the regualar masses. Coming back to limits on email delivery, once you exceed these limits, and sometimes, even before that, your hosting provider will ask you to move to dedicated hosting, which is usually hundreds of dollars per month. At that point, most will want to consider using a hosted solution.
Hosted Solution: There are way too many to even list here. The leading providers are Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp and iContact. These provides own dozens, and some even hundreds of servers that they use to send out their emails. If one of the servers gets in trouble for spam complaints (which are often not valid), then they can still use others to send out their email. Your email has a much higher deliverability chances when you go with these providers. The downsite, well you get to pay a hefty fee for the reliability promise. The cost can be between $15/month to several hundred dollars per month depending on the size or your list and the frequency of your emails. Cost is not the only issue though. Most of these providers require that each of your subscribers double opt in to your list. In other words, if you bring in a list from either of the above options to a hosted provider, your subscriber base will have to confirm that they want to remain part of your list. For many, including good subscribers, they may just decide not to renew their subscription out of laziness. And that could cost you dearly in the long run.
Our recommendation - go with a hosted provider FROM THE BEGINNING. It can cost a bit higher, but you will have your bases covered and potentially save a lot of time and trouble in the long run.
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