Which Email Autoresponder Do I choose ?
There are hundreds of options out there for people, and depending on your particular needs the choices will vary.
I will classify them in 3 categories:
- Website based
- Local or PC based
- Web Hosted like Aweber or Get Response
I am not really going to review all the various email services here. That really isn't the goal of this article. If you are looking for reviews of autorsponders, you will have to look elsewhere. I will give you a little perspective as to why. There are just way too many of them and they all have there problems, and various different offerings. Also depending on weather you are emailing 1 million people vs 100 people, will make a difference and weather you are emailing 100 people 10 times a day versus 10 a month. There are thousands of variations here and each one presents it's own problems.
And I am definitely no expert in this arena and even if some website reviewed these services, I would be really cautious as to the way they actually measured there results. So here is just a very small list of services that I think most marketers use. In no particular order.
-
- Aweber | $19 / 500 SUB / UNLIMITED SENDS / Good
- Get Response
- SendGrid
- Sendlane | $18 / 2000 SUBs / UNLIMITED SENDS
- SendBlaster Only PC based Product | I Use This Myself
- Emailjeet
- Mailchimp| I Use This Myself
- ConstantContact
- ActiveCampaign
- ConvertKit
- And finally your webhosting provider or Cpanel
Okay this is by no means an extensive list, in fact I am sure you could fill this hole page with Autoresponder services. But these are the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
So the question is, which one will I use and believe me I pondered this for along while. The various services cost vary greatly but so do the services. In my opinion Aweber is the easiest to use if you haven't used an autoresponder before, and that is in no small way because of the training area.
Some of these services, if you don't know what you are doing, you are in trouble. I have been using mailchimp for most of my stuff for the past several years and that is because the basic service is free and I only needed for ecommerce and most of all my email didn't require more than a basic autoreponder which can be created in any hosting service cpanel. Which I have done hundreds of not thousands of times.
So here is what it came down to for me, costs and service availability and how often I was going to email my base. I didn't focus on buidling the email forms as much becuase I already know how to build forms and I have software that will build them for me. But if you are new to this, I recommend aweber over everything else. I know alot of marketers prefer Get response or Constant Contact. But that because they know exactly what they want the service todo. Once you get to that point you can afford what ever service you want. Mail chimp for instance isn't cheap once you really start using it over 2000 sends per month. In fact its more than aweber in the end.
So, here is what I decided. I will start with mail chimp because it is free and when I reach 3k or 4k then I will start looking at using another service probably Get repsonse, becuase they offer some great tracking and segmentation, or at least that's what the gurus say. But they are also more expensive, and the mass emailers tend to use services that can send 100k emails a day. We aren't there yet, and those services are expensive, but if you are emailing 100k a day, I guess you can afford it.
So I as I said, I will start with the beast I know the best, My cpanel and Mailchimp and move to other services as I grow or need more services.
It won't hurt anything because building an email list isn't going to be one list anyway. You would normally have segmentation anyway, like buyers of a particular offer, or optins, or freebie seekers, etc. For instance I my email subscriber list for the blog and then I have my email list of members, and if either were to purchase something from me later down the road, then they would be added to that list and on and on. So you are able to move your list over time anyway. You will always have that opportunity.
Summary: I will start with Mailchimp because I know how to build forms myself and it is free to start. Mail chimp does have a form builder, it just doesn't offer as much as Aweber from a beginner stand point.
Thanks for Reading and Safe Journey !
