Auto-responders for those that do not know are scripts/services that allow you to build mailing lists, send broadcasts and prescheduled emails to subscribers. Most marketers opt to pay for services such as Aweber and Getresponse. Entire fortunes can be made using auto-responders.
Paying for others to host your auto-responder was considered the best way to run your own auto-responders up until recently. The problems with these services are the ongoing costs, you do not control the servers and if they go down for days you can not contact your lists, many require double opt-ins and worst of all they control your list.
Take Aweber for instance at the time of this writing charges $29 a month if you have between 501 to 2500 subscribers. That adds up fast and to add insult to injury they count unsubscribes towards your subscriber count. Lets take about this, say you have 2500 real subscribers and have 1 unsubscribed user, you will be bill at the next pricing tier $49 a month for that person that is not even active in your list, that really sucks doesn't it?
If all that isn't enough they tell you that any list your might want to bring over to their service you have to get all your users to opt-in again, statistics show that you will lose up to 70% of your users when doing this… ouch!
All new users with these services typically are required to double opt-in, meaning most will not take the effort to open the confirmation email and click the confirmation link opting them into your list. Another big ouch… all that time to get the lead wasted!
Arpreach to the rescue!
How to get around all this crazy nonsense? Host your own auto-responder such as Arpreach that is a one-time fee Autoresponder email software, you control the list you decide on double opt-ins or not and import all the users you want. It might look pricey at first look that fact is that you will save a lot of money on auto-responder services by hosting your own. When you combine your own hosted auto-responder with mailing services such as Amazon SES or Mandrill you can email thousands of users an hour, have unlimited subscribers and lists. You will be smiling all the way to the bank.
There are other self-hosted auto-responders just as Sendy and IM Rapid Mailer. My experience with Rapid Mailer has not been good at all. Sendy seems to be popular but isn't as feature rich as Arpreach. All these mentioned require you to have PHP based web hosting provider. A hosting provider such as MDD Hosting will do just fine, Host Gator will not!
Mandrill offers you 12000 free emails a month before you get into the paid services. You will need your own auto-responder to use Mandril correctly, again Arpreach is what we use. Many people recommend using Amazon SES as a mailer, I do not recommend Amazon SES at this time because Google seems to send all my mail sent via Amazon SES to spam which makes it worthless to me.
I will be teaching some tricks to use with Mandrill to increase your reputation to allow you to send more emails per hour only in our private, but free members area.
So free yourself from the overpriced, over controlling auto-responder services and host your own with Arpreach Autoresponder!