Even though we use our blog to communite with most of our readers these days, we do see great results with email marketing and use it as a core marketing technique with our online business.
When I first started out I used my autoresponder script running off of my own email server, but for many reasons that solution didn’t scale and I found I was being more of an IT manager than a marketer, so right then and there I decided to outsource my autoresponder function.
For almost 2-years I used a service called Proautoresponder, it was great – but suddenly the owner decided to pull up his business and within weeks my 20,000+ subscribers were stranded.
It took we a few months to track down and autoresponder that I had enough faith in to carry my business – that turned out to be this one.
That was over 3-years ago, and since then I operate dozens of lists with 100’s of follow up messages cued to 10-s of thousands of subscribers and the system handles it brilliantly.
About that time I started testing html email and after a few designs started to notice much higher open and response rates comeing from my html newsletters than the text-only emails.
Granted – it took some time, more than one design and an understanding that people wanted shorter, more concise content that all led to much higher response rates.
Here are some very useful posts on the topic of email marketing that you can refer to when designing your own autoresponder email marketing campaign.
