The problems with Autoresponders

I guess a lot of you are signed up for an autoresponder service like AWeber, GetResponse or Mailchimp because you think it's the best solution, but I'm not sure it is.

Because my main focus the last year or so have been email marketing, I've learned a thing or two about autoresponders.

An autoresponder service is expensive when your subscriber list exceeds 1000 people. I could live with that if the service was first class, but there is one big problem with autoresponders, not only the three I've mentioned, but all autoresponders where your mails are sent from shared servers, the problems is...

Poor delivery rate.

My first autoresponder service was GetResponse and it seemed to be okay, but suddenly my bounce rate was exploding, all my mails were sent to peoples spam folder... why? I've not got any spam complaints at all.

It's because you're getting penalized when other dodgy unethical marketers are spamming people.

When you send your emails from an autoresponder service, your mails are sent from a server you share with thousands of other marketers, and you can be 100% sure there will be some unethical types among those that will spam every email address they can get their hands on.

Gmail and other email providers will notice that and the sending reputation for emais sent from this server will be hurt, sometimes until they shut it down and send every email to the spamfolder. It's not a question about if it will happen, but when and how often.

The autoresponder services will shut down the spammers accounts, but the scenario will repeat itself again and again and therefore the sending reputation will never be top notch. Even when your mails are delivered, they're are delivered in the promotional tab.

So now i have my own autoresponder. I can send broadcasts, i can schedule my emails weeks ahead, i can create opt-in forms, i can do the same as i could do with GetResponse, but without paying a monthly fee and best of all, now i have a 100% delivery rate to peoples inbox.

The reason for this high delivery rate is because I'm sending from my own domain. I connect the software to my own domain, so it's only me who is sending emails from this address, and because I'm an ethical marketer i have a 100% sending reputation. I've never had a spam complaint.

I'm also promoting my website this way instead of promoting a third party service.

So instead of Stefan via GetResponse,com, it now look like this

Stefan <mydomain.com> a bit more sexy for my taste

Is there no drawbacks?... yes and no

If you have a giant subscriber list and the domain you're sending from is hosted on a shared server the sending speed is only 500 emails per hour.

If it's hosted on a dedicated server the speed is 10.000 emails per hour.( more than enough for most people )

I hope you got some useful information regarding autoresponders.

All the best

Stefan