Email Automation Services (Autoresponders)

Those working in internet marketing often hear the advice "The money is in the list", permission based marketing to a list of people who have opted in to an email list can be quite profitable.

Modern email marketers should not be confused with email spammers from Nigerian princesses or someone hawking Viagra using list of millions of emails 'scraped' from the internet.

Ethical marketers conforming to Spam Can regulations only send emails to people who have voluntarily added their email to their list and who may 'opt out' of the mailing list at any time with a single click.

Marketers will commonly use pre-written autoresponder sequences of messages that are automatically initiated by the use's opting into the mail list. Every subscriber receives the same message sequence after subscribing, but not in sync with others who started on a different calendar date.

While there is mass mailing software applications that may be run on your own file server, they don't don't provide a very good deliver rate, primarily because post masters tend to block any single IP sending out too many messages. The solution that all but a few black hat operators running servers offshore employ are autoresponder email services who are able to consistently achieve high delivery rates, 96% to 99% for all the services mentioned here. The accomplish this through a combination of a large number of different IP addresses they rotate through and by maintaining a relationship with the major internet providers, getting on their white lists when available.

The most popular and often recommended service is Aweber, 85% of reviewed marketing tutorial that suggested a service recommended Aweber, a few have problems with the high quality standards Aweber enforces to maintain their reputation with the ISPs. One tip, it's said that if your first mail campaign uses the double opt-in option, your account will be locked in to always use double opt-in. Getresponse is recommended by about 10% of the authors that mention a service.

Some services, like VerticalResponce don't fully support automated mail sequences, other services include autoresponder functionality, many regular email programs can be set to deliver a single autoresponce, which is suitable for ebay order followups, 1ShoppingCart provides autoresponders as part of their integrated ecommerce package that includes shopping cart, payment and affiliate management. Here's another useful Autoresponder Service Review that's worth a look.

 The price comparison chart below shows that all of the services charge essential the same ballpark prices.

  The most noteworthy price differences effect the new operator with a list of less than 500 addresses. iContact has low prices for 250 or 500 address lists. The outstanding case is MailChimp's Forever Free Plan which allows one to send 3,000 messages a month to up to 500 addresses (the are operating on the assumption that you will grow out of the 500 limit and will become a paying customer)

Aside from the trial accounts' volume limitations, it appears that all of these monthly plans allow an unlimited number of messages (your subscribers will ultimately limit the number of messages they will accept)