There are plenty of autoresponder services out there, ranging from under $20 to a few hundred dollar a month. But many internet marketers hesitate to pay these monthly costs and would prefer to pay a one-time fee for an autoresponder script that they can run on their own server.
While it seems like a good way to save money, the fact is there are a number of reasons why running your own autoresponder script is a bad idea and can even hurt your business.
The biggest problem you’ll face when running your own email script is deliverability. Ensuring that your emails make it through to your subscribers is critical to building an effective email list. You can have the biggest list in the world and if your emails aren’t getting delivered, your results aren’t going to be very good.
Spam filtering and blacklisting are two of the biggest issues affecting the deliverability of your email. Trigger words within your email are a big problem as far as spam filtering goes, but you’ll also be affected if too many of your reader click the “spam” button in their email software.
If this happens too much, it can result in your server’s IP address getting blacklisted – and your emails getting filtered out before they even reach your subscribers.
These are important considerations for the major autoresponder services, and they put a lot of resources into ensuring their deliverability stays high. Managing this would be a full-time job in itself, so if you choose to run your own email server you’re really not saving any money – you’re just trading it for the time it takes to manage.
Maintenance is another consideration when you run your own email server. You’ll be responsible for upgrading the script (or paying someone to handle it for you) and ensuring that your data is backed up in case something doesn’t work properly.
If something happens to your server, you could potentially lose all your subscriber data. It’s really not worth the risk when there are services that can manage all that kind of stuff for you.
Ultimately, the cost of the autoresponder service shouldn’t be a problem anyway. If you’re building good relationships with your lists, you should be able to easily make back the cost of the service every month (and then some).
Don’t scrimp on the services that are the backbone of your business – get started on a solid foundation with a reliable autoresponder service.
Learn more about list building now by taking my free 6 day e-course at www.ListBuildingEcourse.com