9 Considerations When Signing Up For An Email Autoresponder

While traditional marketing channels like SMS, fax and direct mail have suffered a huge decline over the last 2 decades, email marketing has remained as strong as ever, and as effective as ever.

And this trend does not seem like stopping anytime soon.

As long as companies are using emails to correspond internally and externally, and people are using emails for personal communications, we can all expect email marketing to continue to thrive.

The rise of mobile data connections did not make emails irrelevant as many industry experts predicted. In fact, it only allowed people to retrieve and respond to emails on-the-go.

And as businesses come to terms of the opportunities online, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you want to tap on email marketing as well by signing up with an email autoresponder service to aid your business.

Here are some things to consider before signing up for one… especially if you are doing it for the first time. I’d just want to add that I currently use GetResponse for my most important customers.

1) Self-hosted or third party service

Don’t be frightened by these geeky terms.

A self-hosted autoresponder basically means that you install the email management software on your own server. Third party services are specialist service providers who run their own custom-built software on their servers.

Unless you run on a powerful server or technically knowledgeable, avoid a self-hosted solution especially when you are a newbie. There are lot of problems that you can run into like:

• getting blacklisted by Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc
• server is not powerful enough to handle your volume
• software glitches that you are unable to fix
• etc

The industry practice is that you should sign up for a third party service first. And once your email subscriber count starts to expand to a pretty significant level, you should by then whether a self-hosted solution is necessary.

Other than that, running an autoresponder script on a shared hosting platform can put you in trouble with your hosting provider. You’d usually need a VPS or dedicated server in order to run the scripts efficiently.

2) Drag and drop newsletter builder

Unless you are a distinguished copywriter who can entice readers to pull out their wallets just from your words, you’d probably want to send out beautifully formatted newsletters to your subscribers.

This can be particularly important if brand building is a priority.

Web-based third party autoresponder service providers used to only send out text-based emails in the early years of the internet. But these days, any reputable service provider should have a drag-and-drop feature which allows their customers to easily create aesthetically pleasing newsletters.

Nicely designed newsletters are usually created with HTML and CSS. This also allows you to properly track your email campaigns… which is the next point.

3) Drag and drop form builder

Some users import their own contacts into their autoresponders. But most web business owners use their own websites as the source of new prospects.

Visitors enter their websites and enter their emails on an embedded form. They are then slotted into the mailing list.

For non-coders, creating and embedding an opt-in form on a website can be a mountain to high to climb.

Service providers understood this and most of them have their own drag-and-drop tools where you can design your own opt-in forms. This has enabled thousands of business owners and marketers to exploit the explosive nature of email marketing without ever knowing a line of code.

If the email service provider you are considering does not have an intuitive form builder, you should definitely look at someone else.

4) Landing pages

Do not confuse opt-in forms with landing pages. Landing pages are the webpage itself. The optin form is just an element contained within the page.

Sort of like just a room (optin form) within a house (landing page).

Some services offer landing pages as part of their features. This means that they will help you host your landing page. In effect, it also means that you don’t have to have your own website in order to build a mailing list… because web traffic can be directed to the landing page they are hosting.

Because they are built in-house, these landing pages will integrate seamlessly with your opt-in forms.

And you can bet that these landing pages are hosted on powerful servers that can withstand a ton of traffic.

However, if you are control freak, you might not want to use this feature at all.

5) Statistics features

Depending on your needs you might be looking for an autoresponder to do something specific.

But usually the most important statistics are the:

• rate of deliverability
• open rate
• click through rate

These stats allow you to learn more about your audience like what they respond to best. This allows you to craft better emails in future.

6) Autoresponder

Obviously this is one of the primary features you want.

Research says that it takes 7 emails for an average consumer to finally become a customer. This is a key selling point that has convinced the masses to use autoresponders to follow-up with prospects and subscribers.

An autoresponder basically allows you to schedule emails to send to subscribers. This allows your business to slowly build a sense of trust and credibility with the readers.

In recent years, there have been some fancy features introduced into autoresponders. But don’t be misled by these gimmicks that service providers create in order to generate higher sales.

The primary feature that should work well is the sending out of your emails according to the schedule you’ve set.

7) Automation features

Since I’ve mentioned “fancy” features previously, I just want you to be aware that in recent years, service providers are starting to offer a lot of automation type of services.

These features basically allow you to track behavior and automate responses that triggers action based on that behavior.

Honestly, I don’t find them useful. But I can see certain businesses leveraging these automation systems to beef up their sales and customer service.

So you have to judge for yourself whether they are for you.

8) Single opt-in

Because of spam, a number of reputable autoresponder service providers do not allow single opt-in subscribers.

Single opt-in means that once someone enters his/her email, he/she is added into your mailing list without a need to confirm their subscription in their email inbox.

Double opt-in requires every contact to verify their subscription by clicking on a confirmation link within a welcome email.

Having no single opt-in feature can pose a huge problem when you already have a lot of contacts which you’d like to import into your campaigns. Because the service provider might not allow you to directly import them without having them confirm their subscriptions.

In some scenarios, you can lose as much as 80% of your existing subscribers if the new service provider you are switching to does not allow a direct import without confirmation.

This single reason is usually the driving force that motivates webmasters to move towards a self-hosted solution instead of a third party web-based autoresponder.

9) Integration

This is a very important aspect in terms of a web business. Software are supposed to make our lives easier. And without integration, you’d think why we are using software in the first place!

Integration being discussed here concerns the integration with other web services.

For example, if you are using an eCommerce platform like Shopify for doing business, you’d want your autoresponder to be able to capture emails automatically of the buyers. Asking them to opt-in again into your newsletter after purchase can be very ineffective.

That’s why using an autoresponder that flawlessly integrates with other services can be a huge time-saver and headache-reliever.