by Jonathan Paston

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series we looked at the type of autoresponder you might need and how the ones housed on your own server or computer kept your lists under your control.

As I explained the downside of this is a fair amount of IT management which you might just prefer to offload to a third party provider.

There are plenty of autoresponder service providers vying for your attention in the marketplace, some of them better suited to large corporate use and with costs that are commensurate with doing a thorough PR job.

Amongst the more affordable services the ones that seem to have captured the internet marketing community’s attention are Aweber and GetResponse. You’ll find that the majority of marketing messages sent out come from one of these two services.

Both claim to have a high percentage of message penetration, by this I mean that the majority of messages sent bypass the junk mail and spam filters and actually get read by the clients.

So why are they so good at what they do?

Your own autoresponder team

As an example I’ll concentrate on the services Aweber has to offer as this is the most popular.

Open an account with Aweber, (your first 30 day trial period is refunded if you decide, for whatever reason, that you don’t want to continue with the service), and you will immediately be led through the basics of setting up your first campaign.

A campaign will have its own opt-in form(s), member list and series of response messages, the latter sent out on a schedule set by you. You can share lists between campaigns if you want to.

Designing your opt-in form is so easy. Aweber provides a graphical interface so that you can label your own information gathering fields and drag and drop them onto the form. You can re-label the Submit button as well as add opening and closing text to your form.

In addition Aweber handles all the web page coding for you to choose Page Embedded, Pop-Up, Pop-Under, Exit Pop-Up and Hover type opt-in forms. Then all you have to do is copy and paste the resulting code (javascript or html - the choice is yours), into your web page.

Want to collect names and emails of your customers? No problem. Aweber parses order completion emails from third party payment processors such as PayPal, 1ShoppingCart, Clickbank, PayDotCom, Google Checkout and others, and automatically adds customers to your list. You can, of course, set up the autoresponder response for digital delivery of your course or ebook if you wish.

High delivery rate

Part of the reason for Aweber’s high percentage email delivery success is due to its open and above-board double opt-in and easy Unsubscribe system.

Although it might seem odd that featuring an Unsubscribe link on every message enhances message delivery you must take into account the high level of reassurance that this gives clients. And the double opt-in system, where subscribers have to verify their email address/confirm their subscription after filling in your on-line form means that you only get ‘wanted’ traffic on your list.

You design your mail-out messages, newsletters and ezines right in Aweber’s graphical template system. This is a WYSIWYG composer that combines plain text and html messages, automatically delivering the correct format to your subscribers. Of course you can personalise your message in a myriad number of ways, only limited by the data you have collected at opt-in. Then your message is put through the SpamAssassin checker which automatically spots words or phrases that might trigger junk mail and spam filters.

You can test your email success rate through Aweber using their Tracking statistics and also split-test opt-in and sales pages to easily see which deliver the highest numbers of subscribers.

And you do have full, manual, control of your list with Aweber’s easy search options and reporting. At any time you can backup and download your list so you’re not exactly giving it away completely to third-party control!

All-in-all using a third party autoresponder service, as so many have found out, eases your workload allowing you to concentrate on your business whilst your hidden autoresponder ‘team’ looks after your communication with your customers.

Aweber offers a 30 day, refundable, trial of their fully featured autoresponder service here. GetResponse provide a 30 day free trial of their basic autoresponder service here with message and response ads removed once you sign up.