Autoresponder vs. E-mail Newsletter Hosting

A commonly asked question is: “What are some good e-mail delivery tools/products? Should I go with an autoresponder or a tool focused mainly on e-mail newsletters?”

The confusion is caused by most e-mail newsletter hosting companies also offer an autoresponder service and most autoresponder services offer e-mail newsletter hosting services… So how do you decide?

Solution:If you don’t intend to have any autoresponders or sequenced email e-courses, then hire the e-mail service provider that offers e-mail newsletter hosting as its primary business.

Most e-mail newsletter hosting companies don’t configure their business to be compatible with a sequenced e-mail delivery toolset. This is the ability to setup a multi-part course that is delivered via e-mail, even though most e-mail newsletter hosting service providers offer simple autoresponder services.

If you do end up going the autoresponder ESP (E-mail Service Provider) route, be certain to do your research to review their e-mail deliverability history. Autoresponder service providers often have a much harsher environment to keep their e-mail list management servers from being blocked than non-autoresponder ESPs, especially if they are relatively new in the marketplace.

I wouldn’t recommend hiring any autoresponder service provider that isn’t at least two to three years old in the marketplace and has a clean reputation for not accepting clients that would use their service to deliver spam or engage in questionable activities, such as safelists. You can check the usenet group called: news.admin.net-abuse.email

Whether you go either direction, be certain to demand e-mail campaign reporting tools that will also give you real-time delivery reports so that you can monitor whether or not your e-mails are actually getting delivered. No one will ever care more about your e-mail deliverability rate than you! :-)

Christopher M. Knight is an e-mail publishing expert that offers you more free e-mail publishing tools via his weekly free newsletter that can help you grow your list, improve your e-mail deliverability and solve e-mail newsletter problems: Ezine-Tips.com