by Jonathan Paston

As I explained in my last post there are a plethora of autoresponders grabbing for your business, so it is important to choose the right one.

Get it wrong and you’ll find yourself mucking about with databases and csv files as you try and transfer your list of clients from one service provider to another. And, often, autoresponder servers may ask for all your list members to go through the opt-in method all over again and many may either ignore your request or just not bother!

Server based autoresponders

It is very tempting to house an autoresponder on your own server. By the way many host providers furnish you with a simple autoresponder. All these do, however, is send a single automatic response when a message is sent to a prescribed email address. This is not really enough for proper, and profitable, management of your client list.

There are several php based scripts around, the most comprehensive of which is Mailloop,  which you can upload to your server and keep details of your clients names and emails in a database. This has the advantage that your list membership is under your full control. In addition you can decide whether to use single or double opt-in (the latter is where the subscriber is required to reply to a confirmation email) and, of course, you are free to broadcast to as many of your list as you want, as many times as you want.

Apart from the IT management aspects the disadvantages of running your own autoresponder server may not be obvious at first glance, so let me spell them out for you.

First of all you may need to stagger email broadcasts. Depending on your server capacity sending a message to tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of list members may overload your server and SMTP system unless you send them out in batches.

Then there is the aspect of how many of your emails will avoid spam traps that send them immediately into a Junk Mail folder or reject them altogether. You really must make sure that your software is capable of handling unsubscribe and bounced emails successfully.

Finally you have the extra IT requirements of creating opt-in forms, supervising your list and database and working out how to send html messages to those who can read them and plain text to those who can’t. But there is one significant advantage that drives users to house their own autoresponder on their own servers - all your links and messages come from your domain name.

Home based software

There are a few programs that will run an autoresponder service on your office or home computer. Probably the most friendly of these is MailList King which you can run from any PC and which integrates brilliantly with Microsoft Outlook.

MailList King runs alongside Outlook using rules that divert incoming emails with a Subscribe or Unsubscribe subject line through to its list management system. You can set up a response message, or timed series of responses, to mail out to new subscribers and it is easy to broadcast to any, or all, of your list.

In addition MailList King allows you to segregate your list members into categories so that you can broadcast particular messages to different sectors of your market. MailList King can either send messages in batches using your Outlook settings or via its own SMTP server - I found the latter to be relatively slow at sending to a large list, so it is preferable to run everything through your own mail settings.

All this takes a bit of juggling with the software but, once you’ve got it set up, it is simply a matter of running a daily routine to manage your list.

Downsides are that your autoresponder will only run whilst your computer is on and connected to the internet and broadcasting to a list ties up its resources for a fair length of time if you have a list than runs into thousands. In addition automatic management of multiple lists can be done using Outlook’s Rules and MailList King’s database fields, but it’s all rather fiddly and perplexing to set up.

This may be the way to go, though, if your client list is a few thousand or less, you only need to manage a single list and you are looking for a cost-effective solution.

Both the server and home based autoresponder solutions avoid the monthly management fee that you will have to pay to a third party autoresponder service. But you may just decide that a small monthly fee is well worth it once you’ve read my next post in this series!