Choosing the Best Autoresponder

Why You Need an Autoresponder

Your email follow up system is the first part of your business that you should automate. You need to be able to engage with your leads and customers long after they have left your website. Your autoresponder is like your personal assistant who works 24-7 and never calls in sick.

If you don’t yet have an autoresponder, you’ll never know why you need a service like Aweber until you try it.

Choosing the Best Autoresponder

Now that you’ve decided to use an autoresponder, you have a decision to make and there are dozens of providers to choose from. Aweber, Get Response, iContact, Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are all decent options. There are a few more but these are probably the most popular and I’m only really going to write about Aweber.

You need to choose an autoresponder that fits with your business needs and how you plan to use it. Ask yourself how often you intend to mail out and how many customers you want to reach. There are really 2 main options to decide on:

1. Web based autoresponder or self hosted?

For most small businesses, charities and entrepreneurs, an web-based service is the best. Online autoresponders usually have a monthly subscription based on the size of your mailing list and level of use. You don’t need to worry about installing software updates or lack of support. Delivery rates can be higher because online email services like Aweber work with ISPs to build their reputation and avoid spam complaints. This allows you to leverage the reputation of the service provider so your email reaches your customer and not their trash.

Hosting your own email autoresponder on your server is possible but you need to know what you’re doing because you don’t have the support or training of a web-based service. I wouldn’t recommend this option unless you really need it and you have your own in-house tech support.

2. How Much do Autoresponders Cost?

There are autoresponder packages are aimed at every budget from free (but limited) services to $499 plus for Infusionsoft. You get what you pay for and I’d never recommend cutting corners here. Remember, this will be a central pillar in your business.

Do your research.

Why I Chose Aweber

My research started with recommendations – I didn’t look for opinions, I looked for facts. Than meant checking my inbox to see what autoresponders the pros were using. I looked at all the newsletters I was subscribed to and amazingly over 80% of subscriptions were handled by Aweber. You can’t argue with social proof like that.

In fact as I write this post, Justin Brooke*, Yaro Starak, Alex Jeffreys, Jeff Johnson, Liz Tomey, Soren Jordansen, Ryan Deiss* and Yanik Silver are all using Aweber – far more than all the rest of the professional autoresponders added together. That’s good enough for me.

[*Update - Justin and Ryan have recently moved their lists over to iContact to take advantage of the more advanced functions and avoid some of the limitations of Aweber that can have an impact when you have a very large mailing list].

I’d already read a some ebooks recommending Aweber and after checking a few reviews by Yaro and Darren Rowse, my mind was made up. Aweber is undoubtedly the best autoresponder to start out with and if you find that you do need an alternative solution like iContact, it’s far easier to export your contacts from aweber than it is to import them, so switching is easy.

Jump to my full Aweber Review or learn how to get a discount.