Which Auto-Responder Do You Use?
Everybody knows that auto-responders are great tools. Auto-responders are those great scripts that can send an immediate email back when somebody sends you one, even if you are out of the office and will be away from your email. For Internet marketers, auto-responders are used to send out newsletters, email courses or info follow-ups when an interested person fills out the contact form.
Marketing autoresponders, sometimes called sequential autoresponders because they will send out a prepared set of emails to your subscribers at set times. A list of 4 choices appear below. I like all of them, but am drawn to the AutoResponderUnlimited because it is a simple and easy web-site hack that can cheaply make your marketing system take off.
AWeber (www.aweber.com/?283855) provides a very popular hosted autoresponder system, offering a single campaign and up to 6 follow-up messages for $19.95/month.
AutoResponse Plus (www.autoresponseplus.com) is hosted on your own server and allows you to make a large number of concurrent campaigns. $197 which includes 2 years of updates and free upgrade to ARP4.
AutoResponderUnlimited (http://NetworkDefense.biz/aru) This is an older model, and the company that made it has disappeared. I have been testing it on my web server, and it works great. Multiple concurrent campaigns like ARP, but includes Free Resale Rights for $47
PostMaster Express (http://www.post-master.net/rs/w0lf) runs right on your desktop, if you have Windows on your computer. It provides for multiple lists and sequential autoresponders. $299.
Setting up ARU
When you are setting up ARU, pay close attention to the manual. The most complicated issue is getting the permissions set right. If you think it is set up right but the autoresponder is not working, check your website error logs. They will tell you what you are missing. In my case there was an issue that the webserver was set up to disallow 777 on any folder. When I fixed the mode to 755, the autoresponder started working magically, after I added the link <img src=”http://www.secret2lastinglove.info/cgi-bin/autoresponder/activate.cgi”width=1 height=1</img> to my main page. You would use your own domain name, not secret2lastinglove.info
The new test autoresponder has 3 messages, timed to go out on the 0, 1, and 2 day after you subscribe. I have only edited the content of the 1st email (so far), so if you want to test it, you will get only 1 that makes sense.
The site is in development but I put the automatically generated form, that ARU produced, on the main page. It is not really pretty, but using html I can rearrange it to look any way I want.
Issues to consider
The biggest issue with AWeber is that all AWeber customers are sending from the aweber.com domain. If that domain is blacklisted or blocked because somebody else is spamming from the site, your newsletters won’t go out either. Also the price will go up if you want to have more than one campaign going on. The good thing is that you can test the concept for less than $20 (if you can get a project up and running in less than a month).
The biggest issue with ARP is it is upfront cost. What’s good about it is that it has a huge collection of features. If you are planning to be a powerhouse marketer, you will probably end up using ARP (about half my marketer clients do).
The biggest issue with ARU is the lack of recent updates. Networkdefense will help you get it working but does not own rights to do upgrades. The good thing about ARU is that the licence allows you to resell it and keep all of the profits. This makes it as portable as a piece of software can be that is not open-source.
The biggest issue with Postmaster Express is the limit that your ISP puts on your concurrently sending the same email to multiple people. Many ISPs will black-hole your IP address if you send out more than 20 emails in less than 10 minutes, so a desktop mailer, no matter how cool, will have to go slow. You will not want to use this for your 10,000 member list. It could take you over 400 hours to send to your list! The good thing about it is that it will feel familiar to Windows users. Web-based applications can be weird sometimes. Especially if you are having to look at the file system through an FTP client.
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