I was searching for the best autoresponder to use for business and as many of us do – went to Google to search for unbiased opinions, reviews and experiences. The quest was a bit time consuming – Google still has a work to do eliminating useless spam and zero-value pages from their index. Until they do – we – the searchers has to do it ourselves. So I did it and filtered through the content of all these results to make the final choice.
My research might save you time if you’re after similar task.
I already have basic shopping cart account with 1ShoppingCart and they also offer autoresponder at extra monthly cost. Another contender is AWeber. I also found quite a few people using GetResponse. I wanted to find which one is the best and whether I might be missing other choices in this area.
Choosing the right autoresponder is VERY important as the task of moving away from it later on could mean serious loss of established business (old list members refuse to re-optin).
I decided to search for reasonably fresh pages – dated less than 1 yr old. I wanted to find decent reviews/comparisons/articles regarding choosing the right autoresponder.
So here I just list the reasonably decent posts I found and at the end summarize my choice.
- Great discussion thread of Aweber vs GetResponse and autoresponders in general is here:
(Link changed by portal, sorry)
Includes direct responses from Tom Kulzer – founder of AWeber.
Summary – even the ones who blame Aweber for their glitches, agrees that 1SC is worse.
Winner: Aweber. - Good thread at:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/405/aweber-email-autoresponder-review/
Author was slightly biased to Aweber although plenty of valuable replies / comments and answers on questions. Some mentioning 1ShoppingCart.
Overall winner: Aweber. - Short Positive report about switching from 1ShoppingCart to Aweber:
http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/testing-aweber-v.-1shoppingcart-for-deliverability
Winner: Aweber. - Another fresh post from Gobala Krishnan:
http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/aweber-defines-email-marketing/
His view in terms of choices: 1: Aweber, 2: GetResponse, 3: 1ShoppingCart
Winner: AWeber. - I wanted to find something “bad” about AWeber just to fill both sides of scale and came across great blog post of Caroline Middlebrook:
http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/aweber-6-painful-lessons-learned/
At first I thought that her painful lessons would tell people to stay away from aweber, yet i found great teaching article and tips that help other people to actually use aweber more productively.
Cautious winner: Aweber. - Nice post that explains benefits of Aweber vs. Feedburner/Feedblitz:
http://www.chrisg.com/aweber-versus-feedburner-for-bloggers-with-email-newsletters/
Main point of this article is that Aweber beats feedburner/feedblitz combo with introduction of a service that can read your RSS and post it out to subscribers.
I personally was glad to learn that. And here’s how Aweber explains it:
When you publish articles to your blog, your blogging software automatically publishes content to an RSS feed containing your newest blog posts.
Our Blog Broadcast feature can check this feed frequently for new content, and if any new articles are found, a blog email newsletter will be automatically created and sent to readers who subscribe to receive them.
This article had great replies from people as well – worth reading! Readers seems to jointly agree in appreciating AWeber’s customization features.
Additionally to that from my personal experience customizing and setting up feedblitz as a full blown autoresponder is not for the faint of heart. I really didn’t like it’s non intuitive and convoluted interface and hence will be switching to other means of feed-to-email delivery.
ON a side note – author have a nice posts for beginner bloggers/marketers about email marketing in general – worth checking:
http://www.chrisg.com/email-marketing-tips-what-is-email-marketing/ - Tom Kulzer (founder of AWeber) on email deliverability to yahoo email addresses:
(need to click link in video window):
http://www.marketing-ideas.org/Stump-Markus-648.php
Conclusions + Bottom line:
- Switching from one autoresponder to another one is bad – choose one carefully and stick with it.
- Stay away from “free” solutions. What you pay is what you get.
- I’ve known marketers who use solutions that cost almost 100x times more than AWeber but have yet to see independent trustworthy report of their real benefits.
- 1ShoppingCart is great integrated solution for everything e-commerce. It is an excellent shopping cart, it’s premium version includes affiliate marketing features, digital downloadable products delivery and autoresponder as well. If you want all-in-one for everything (ecommerce+autoresponder) this might work well.
There were number of people though who expressed criticism toward 1SC autoresponder’s features and capabilities in favor of Aweber.
Overall winner of all autoresponders: www.Aweber.com
