Studies show a potential visitor will take seven to nine messages before s/he becomes comfortable with you and eventually contacts or preferably buys your products or services. If you are left with only one marketing tool, what would you retain? Most marketers would say autoresponders or their email list. This tells you how serious you should treat your email marketing effort AND your autoresponder tool.

What is an autoresponder? An email autoresponder allows you to follow up your potential customers at a predefined timeframe automatically through emails. You may acquire this functionality by installing a script on your webhosting or you can acquire this function through third party autoresponder service providers Is your email autoresponder working as effectively as designed? What criteria should you consider when it comes to picking an email autoResponder? What is the single most important criteria when choosing your autoresponder service?

Three criteria you should consider before you invest your hard-earned cash in this vital marketing tool. A great deliverability is the most sought-after feature of any email autoresponder. Any internet user would receive tons of SPAM mails in their mail-box each day. If you use Gmail, you should be familiar with the screen shot below. There are 2808 spam emails in my Gmail account as at the time of writing. I will never read these emails. If you use some poor autoresponder service, your emails will automatically be streamed into these SPAM folders. You may ask, “What determines which email go to “SPAM” folder?” Unless you are gmail.com, you don’t know their “way of thinking”.

But definitedly you don’t want to be the one who emails the optins to their SPAM folder. But what is the main cause for your emails not being able to reach your targetted prospects or subscribers? There are many reasons why it is the case, but by far the most important reason is this: Is your autoresponder a self hosted script OR third party autoresponder service? As mentioned, you acquire your autoresponder function either by the script you hosted on your website or you may build your list and your autoresponder through a third party service provider.The mission of a third party autoresponder service providers is to deliver your emails. Why do I not recommend a self-hosted script which you can install onto your webhost?

The reason is one word: “SPAM”. Some of your subscribers will report you as SPAM, no matter how diligent and sincere you are with your email marketing campaigns. People just forget they sign up on your list. They will report your emails as SPAMs some day down the road. It’s just a matter of “when”, not “If”. When subscribers report your emails as spams, their internet service provider (ISP) may blacklist your future emails. This blocks your emails getting into their inbox in the future. I have previously used a hosted service, which had good results initially (for about 6 months). After a few of my ex-subscribers complaint me spamming them, my emails are not as effective as before. Treat email autoresponders service companies eat and breath on deliverability.

They ensure your emails get delivered. Some autoresponder service us claiming that it delivers 99.34%, meaning it their readers get 99 emails out of 100 emails! There are some free autoresponder services out there. I urge you not to waste your time finding or even trying one. Why? I have used those services and only found myself promoting someone!|s else services. Those free services basically send out your emails with their own embedded advertising. Your readers will read their ads first before your messages. If you are not serious about your business, use free autoresponsers. Price should be the least concern, as autoresponder is your lifeblood of your viral traffic. Usually a quality autoresponder costs around $20 a month.