Internet Marketing Lessons – Lesson 6 – Choosing An Autoresponder

In this lesson, I cover what to look for in an autoresponder service.

In my last lesson I covered what an autoresponder was – now let’s cover how to choose an autoresponder service.

Here’s a few things to look for in an autoresponder service.

1) The Ability To Run Multiple Campaigns. Having just one autoresponder just isn’t going to cut it even if you have only one website since you’re likely going to have more than one campaign running and you’ll likely want to segment your customers so you can target your offers better.

2) The ability to personalize messages – Its been years since I’ve seen an autoresponder that doesn’t do this, because it’s so important. This feature allows you to address the person on your list by name, provided you’ve collected that info. So rather than addressing the subscriber as Dear Reader, you can address them as Dear John, or whatever their name is. Your messages will be opened more often, and you’ll ultimately make more money because of it.

3) The Ability To Test – This is very important, although it’s a chronically underused feature. But it’s important to be able to test so you can make your message more effective. Good autoresponder services will allow you to split test different messages to see which get better results. You definitely want this feature – and you definitely want to use it. Just remember, testing is your friend.

4) Tracking – You want to make sure that the you can track things like how many people actually opened your message and even how many people clicked on the links in your message. Just like with testing, if you’re not tracking your messages, you’re really just stumbling around in the dark.

5) High Delivery Rates – Many services publish the rate at which their emails are successfully delivered. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re read, but at least they’re getting through. You want to make sure that your autoresponder service can actually get your message to your subscriber or there’s no point in doing business with them. Look for deliverability rates well above 90%.

So what are some good autoresponder services? A few good ones are Aweber, GetResponse and 1ShoppingCart.   At the higher end are solutions like Email Labs and InfusionSoft.  My favorite is Aweber, but that’s just a personal preference, take a look at them all and decide which is best for you.