I make extensive use of autoresponders, and they are invaluable. I use them to deliver email series (such as “9 Reasons to Add Games to Your Site” or “7 Days of Success Quotations”) and I use them to publish occassional newsletters to lists of clients and affiliates. I do not, however, run my primary newsletter (with +83,000 subscribers) off of my auto-responder software.
To run my autoresponders, I installed Auto Response Plus on my server. It is an amazing piece of software — feature rich, and inexpensive. Like most of my server decsions, I have preferred to run these programs off my own server, and not have to pay monthly fees to outside service providers.
When the Internet economy crashed in 2001, and many Internet companies disappeared, these turned out to be very smart decisions. I had all the software I needed to run my business on my own server (I wasn’t dependent on outside vendors) and I had kept my monthly overhead to a minimum.
And here are two ebooks that taught me everthing I know about autoresponders:
1) Autoresponder Magic by Yank Silver can be purchased (with resale rights) for $17. Or you can get it for free by signing up for “Top Ten Autoresponder Tips” at AutoResponsePlus.com.
2) After I was using autoresponders for awhile, I also got a lot from Bryan Kumar’s “Autoresponder Maximizer” which is currently included in the Money Browser offer.