Yesterday we looked at some self-hosted scripts. Today we’ll concentrate on third-party services which have FREE accounts.
Free Autoresponder services- not just a free trial
There are several autoresponder services out there that offer a free account- NOT just a free trial, but a FREE account.
My favorite is
1.) MailChimp by far- It is a FULL-Featured autoresponder. The only limitation in the free account is – 500 subscribers and you are allowed to send only 3000 messages a month – Great for the beginner! As far as I can tell you set up as many autoresponders, lists and groups as you want.
Some of their best features are open & click tracking. Many premium services track click-thru rates but very few track who opens them. They have live webinars and videos, a good selection of templates, so they’re easy to work with if you are a non-techie.
The only ad so to speak placed in the email is your choice of text or image “Spread the Monkey-Love” with your affiliate link, so you get credit for anyone who uses it to sign up.
2.) Next is Rapid ResponseBot – which is the Parabots script. You can only import one name at a time- even if you upgrade. They’re easy to use, do not have the video support or tracking & stats capabilities that MailChimp offers. You are limited to 1 autoresponder, 1 list. But they are still good.
3.) WordPress Plugins– there are 2 that are free MailChimp, BFT & GWA . There are others, but they require you to have a paid account. BFT & GWA are very simple, but limited in features. I haven’t tried the MailChimp plugin yet, but I will add an update when I do.
I also tried MailPress which is a great plugin, but I had trouble with it emailing all 1500 users each time a post was made, so I think there’s a lil bug in the batch send plugin (this plugin has plugins of it’s own)
WordPress also has plugins to email users. Works nicely, but that’s about all it does. It will not collect names and emails for you, so unless all your readers HAVE to be registered in order to access your blog- these plugins will not help you very much w/ your marketing.
There are others out there, most of them have sponsored ads and are very limited in features, but these are the ones I think work the best and are worth you giving them a try.
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