Choosing the Right Newsletter or Autoresponder Service

One of the most popular tips you will read about starting an online business is that you ought to have a newsletter or autoresponder series, possibly both. This increases your chances of making a sale to a given visitor.

There are quite a few services out there, however, and it is very important to choose a good one or risk your messages not being delivered, or worse, getting yourself blacklisted by association.

You absolutely want a service that has a good relationship with the various ISPs, so that you can make it through the spam filters. They will probably have a lot of rules about how you can add people to your list. If you already have a list, you may even have to reverify your entire list, unless you can prove that every subscriber on your list chose to be there, by providing records including IP address, email address, time and date stamp and so forth. So it is best to start out with a service you can stay with for years.

Due to CAN-SPAM, there are quite a few rules about how you can run your list, and a good service will make it easy for you to follow those rules. These days, double opt-in, meaning that a subscriber has to respond to a confirmation email in order to be added to your list, is very strongly recommended for your own protection.

There are plenty of services out there that are free to use up to a certain number of subscribers or messages sent per month. However, they are not always the best for long term use, and may not always have the best relationships with ISPs.

But, in reality you have a budget to deal with, and may not be able to afford your preferred service at first. You need to balance your needs for excellent control of your list with what you can realistically afford to pay for it.

One option, of course, is to simply run the list on your own. There are many programs out there to help you do so. Do not just try using the BCC function on your email program; this is one of the things that can get you filtered as spam, and it is tedious to keep up with the subscribes and unsubscribes in a timely manner.

One problem with running your list on your own server is that if you get blacklisted you have to figure out for yourself how to fix it. Paying for a service means that they take care of such headaches.

AWeber is my personal choice. For a monthly fee, you can have unlimited autoresponders and use it to manage your newsletter. It can send in both text and HTML formats, and if you have multiple lists, you can send an email to more than one, and it will combine the lists so that each subscriber only gets the message once, no matter how many lists they are subscribed to under the same email address. With a free trial and a great bonus from Jonathan Mizel, not to mention a great relationship with most ISPs, AWeber is extremely popular with internet marketers of all levels.
GetResponse is very popular, as you can sign up for an unlimited number of free autoresponders, but it has at times had less success at maintaining a good relationship with some ISPs. That said, they do better than many other autoresponders, and they have good relationships with most of the major ISPs at this time. The free version is ad supported, but once you go Pro you do not have ads on your messages.
SendFree is another autoresponder that offers free autoresponders as well as paid services. You once again get unlimited autoresponders, and the ability to manage your newsletter, as with the above choices. You can test drive the Preferred Membership free for one month, so you can find out if this is the autoresponder for you. If you don't like it, you can drop to the free version with no problems.

There are many other services out there to choose from, of course. The main thing you need to worry about with any autoresponder service is that you can continue to use it for a long time. Changing services is an incredible hassle, which I tell you from experience. Many times you will lose most of your list in the reverification process. Choose wisely yet within your budget.

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