If you are REALLY intending to go into internet marketing, I urge you to have autoresponder. Be it, a free one, I dont care. At least, any autoresponder is better than NONE at all!

If you are still considering the prices of autoresponders that are available in the market now, you may have decided to search and use a free autoresponder. One of the options for a free autoresponder should be the one that comes with your webhosting account. That is, IF you have a webhosting account. These autoresponders can be easily be set up through the control panel of your website, and they do not contain advertisements from the autoresponder company or webhosting service. However, if you dont have a webhosting account, or yours does not include any autoresponders, there are also other options for you.

In fact there are many free autoresponder services in the market to choose from. They are free because the company makes money by putting a small advertisement in each message that your autoresponder sends out. These advertisements may appear at the top of your emails, or the bottom, depending on which autoresponders which you are using.

Another type of “free” autoresponder comes from those paid autoresponder companies. They offer a free version as well. These free versions may or may not include advertisements in the outgoing mails. But note that these trial versions usually dont include many useful and powerful features of the full versions. However, if you dont need those advance features, then why pay for it?

Though it is always more attractive to make use of those free services, you must understand what you really need and what are all the limitations of these free services. Most free autoresponders have a limit on the number of subscribers you can have. Many people start out with the limited free versions, and then upgrade to the paid versions once their lists are large enough to exceed those limits. Many marketers don’t feel that the expense of the autoresponder is warranted  until the list that they are building is turning a profit. From a business standpoint, this makes sense.

But you need to understand that when you want to “migrate” list to a paid version, especially when you realised that you needed more advanced features or you have exceeded the limit on the number of subscribers, you have to ask your subscribers to give you their consent to join your mailing list AGAIN. Mind you, usually people will feel it is either troublesome to re-join your list or they might just overlook your emails to join your mailing list again. Then, you might just lose those valuable potential customers of yours. Some might think of using “baits”, such as free ebooks or videos, to attract their subscribers back, but you must be prepared that the conversion rate will never be near to 100%. The next problem of using free autoresponders is that they will have the small advertisements in the outgoing messages. This may potentially present a problem if the ads happen to be competing with what you are trying to sell.

Therefore, as the owner of a business, you are the only one who can decide whether you need a paid autoresponder service, or if a free one will do the job. If your list is small, a free autoresponder should do everything that you need it to do, but as your list grows, you should definitely consider upgrading. Again, this depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your autoresponder.

Tags: autoresponders, free