How to Choose an AutoResponder Service ?

Posted by Dave 19 December, 2008

Internet marketing can tough, you need to drive traffic to your website, convince people to buy and after they bought you need to begin the all process for the beginning and find new customers.

Collecting a list of your customers /visitors contact details can increase your sells and save you a lot of time when you start to promote new products or services and need to find those customers again.

How do you collect your customers contact details ?

If you are not collecting you visitors / customers details the you should know that you loosing money.

In order to collect those details you will need to use a software / service that enable you to put a simple HTML form that will collect those details and save them for a future use. Those services will also help you sending new offers to all of your customers or to specific ones.

Keeping in touch with you potential customers is very important and will reduce all the hard in finding them again.

This services are called autoresponders or email services or any other similar name.

When it come to choosing which autoresponder service to use you have two options, either you can use a you own in house service like a software or script that installed on your server, or you can choose to use a 3rd party company like Aweber or GetResponse that will do all the job for you.

Lets see what are the pro and cons for each one:

In house service (software / script on you server)

Pros

You are in control – you have the ability do make customization to your service and build custom service.
One time fee / price – In most case when you use you own service you pay for the product only once and it’s your forever.

Cons

You have got to have you own server, which in most cases you already have (it can be the same server you use to host your website).
You have got to have some technical knowledge to solve problems that can occur.
You emails may find them selves in junk / spam folder. Because you don’t have special contracts with big Internet providers like most 3rd party services have, your email may end up in the junk folder. This one can be a big decision maker.

3rd Party services (like GetResponse, Aweber etc.)

Pros

The company that provide the services will handle and problem that may occur
Your email are safe and will always arrived to the inbox folder no worries about getting to spam folder – most 3rd services have special agreements with the big Internet providers services
The service function are always updates to current technology – new features added from time to time in order to make the service more productive.
In most case the 3rd party services have more features then in house solutions.

Cons

You pay for the service every month as long as you use it.
You don’t have the ability to customize the services if you have special need (although most 3rd services include a lot of features that in many cases are more the enough).

In one of my next posts I will give you a free depth compression between best low cost autoresponder services GetResponse and Aweber.

In the mean time you can visit a great website that have many reviews on the most popular Autoresponder services.

You can find it on Best-Autoresponders.Elite-Reviews.Net.

Feel free to comment with your ideas or suggestions.