What Is The Best Autoresponder Service For Small Business?

If you’ve read any of the articles or reports from this website, than you will know that I am a strong advocate of using an autoresponder service as part of your overall marketing strategy

Autoresponder services allow you to prepare a follow up email marketing campaign that is set and forget. Once you have all your emails created, uploaded and spaced out at your desired intervals, all you need to do is convince people to sign up.

There are dozens (probably even hundreds) of autoresponders out there – but which ones are the best for a small business email marketing campaign?

There are two autoresponders that I would recommend to a small business owner, Aweber and Constant Contact. I have done individual reviews of both of these which you can read by following the links below.

• Aweber Review
• Constant Contact Review

In this article I’m going to compare the two, and talk about the strengths and weaknesses for you as a small business owner.

Aweber

Aweber is renowned as being the top of the pack in the autoresponder market – they are the preferred choice for many people who do a large portion of their business online.

One of the real strengths of Aweber is their low tolerance of spam – they have built a strong reputation in the industry based on this USP, and as such their delivery rates are considered to be the highest in the email marketing industry

They have achieved this position as a result of two key factors.

1. Their requirement that all people who sign on to your list must go through a double opt-in process. This is where they initially give you their email address, then immediately receive an email that requires them to click a link confirming they do in fact wish to receive emails from your business.
2. Their rule that if you want to import email contacts from another source, they still need to go through this process. This prevents people from buying dodgy lists of tens of thousands of email addresses.

So for some small businesses this may be a bit of a negative.

Many of the email addresses that you could potentially collect would be in-store at the time of purchase, or with a promotion you run that captures a prospects details when they are entering or leaving your store.

So does this mean a small business owner should rule Aweber out as an option altogether?

Not at all – you just need to weigh up where and how you are going to be collecting the majority of your email addresses. And even if you think this is going to be in your store, there are still strategies you can use to ensure a high rate of success.

For example, lets say you are currently capturing email addresses by running a competition, with an entry form in store. There are two ways you could go with this.

• The first option is to ask the customer to enter your competition at your website.

This has the advantage of pushing them to your online presence, which gives you a greater opportunity to market to them online as well as off.

The disadvantage here is that you are definitely going to get fewer people on to your list this way – its just human nature. Not everyone is going to remember, or be bothered to visit your site when they get home.

• The second option is to import the list yourself.

The key to doing this well, is to make sure that at the time they leave you their email address you let them know that they are going to receive an email from you that asks them to confirm their subscription to your list.

You also need to be clear in the subject line and ‘from’ email address of this confirmation  email who it is from to ensure they actually open it and confirm their subscription.

Constant Contact

If all this seems like it is going to cost you sign-ups then you are possibly right, and you may want to use an alternative autoresponder service such as Constant Contact.

Constant Contact allows you to import your email addresses without requiring them to confirm that they want ot be on your list, so for many small business owners this may be a better option.

The thing is, Aweber has slightly better delivery rates  so in the long run this will probably balance out.

And the larger your list is, the more important a high delivery rate becomes. So if you think your business has the potential to build a list of many thousands of people, this is a factor that you will need to consider.

So which one should you choose?

They are both good, and you can’t really go wrong either way. In many instances it simply comes down to a personal preference for the ease of use of the autoresponder service.

Both Aweber and Constant Contact offer risk free trial period, so maybe you could sign up for both, look at each interface and decide for yourself which one you prefer.

Craig