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List building - Mailchimp, Aweber, GetResponse, iContact, or? (14)

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Best / worst in terms of deliverability, pricing, etc.?

Don't plan to be direct linking from my emails, but I'd hate to lose my account (and associated data) for promoting affiliate offers.

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I would go with icontact. simple - all the motherfuckers (make money online) gurus using it now to promote their crap courses (huge lists), and if icontact as a provider allows that you're good to go in my opinion (promoting affiliate offers).

I personally use aweber (), and heard so many bad things about them lately (deliverability issues), so i also tried to confirm that with my previews stats.. month by month, and i could definitely say i'm seeing a glitch in the last 4-5 months. and my lists are growing daily. just didn't find the time to move on. basically the lists on my aweber account are not affiliate marketing related (offers), so i hope it still can help you decide which route to take.

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Any email service that doesn't let you build a list (double opt-in) that you send affiliate links to, can go fuck themselves. Email list is one of the most important business assets you can own in this business. You're doing it wrong if you are trusting your business on some autoresponder company. Autoresponder companies are there to send scheduled emails, nothing more - do not use them as a primary vault for your lists, you are going to get fucked sooner or later. Always collect email addresses to your own archives first before submitting them into autoresponder company.

I recently decided to try CampaignMonitor and at least not yet I haven't got anything bad to say. Prepare yourself that later on you might have to get an in-house mailing solution and use SMTP service like SendGrid who I can recommend.

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^^^ true

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@qhead : you mean send the lead to your own self hosted solution first before sending to the email service ?

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Well you can do it multiple ways. The simplest way is just to save visitor's data into a text file on the server (make sure the file is saved in a directory that's not open to the public). The point is that even if you don't do anything with the data, you have it. Then if some autoresponder company feels like you are not a customer they want for whatever reason, you don't lose anything. You can then either go with another autoresponder company or start mailing with your own server with a proper SMTP.

If you use those embedded opt-in forms from let's say CampaignMonitor you will need to do some javascript trickery to get it saved first. It's pretty simple with for example jQuery but of course if you don't know how to do javascript, it's not simple

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Try a self hosted solution such as arpReach, or Interspire.

arpReach is current got a $100 off coupon, so I just bought it - seems much better than Interspire, which rarely gets updated.
Get this, and then pair it with Amazon SES or Sendgrid, and you get better deliver-ability then Aweber etc., and at a fraction of the cost.
Lastly of course, as qhead mentioned, this way you own your own data, can do single opt in, and basically run it how you like.

The only downside to self hosted, is that most 'shiny new tools' that come out, only tend to work with AWeber, mailchip etc., and ignore the self hosted solutions.
Still, if you know a decent programmer, should be able to get around that with minimal cost.

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I'm currently using Aweber for my list, heard horror stories on people losing their list due to whatever reasons, been thinking of a way to ensure the lead in the safe hand. I already setup interspire + Amazon SES, because I'm still new to building a list, I stay with aweber, until myself ready for self hosted solution, thank again for your suggestion, it does help me sleep better at night.

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The most affiliate friendly in the top players is definitely GETRESPONSE !

You can email everyday, only promo emails etc and they are fine with it, even with single opt-in.

Aweber and the rest are good when you do info products, and mail like twice or so a week, with some free content in the middle, but when you get thousands of emails everyday through ppv for example and you just wanna email offers daily then get response is the answer, and deliverability is great of course.


Mehdi

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yeah mehdi good point need to switch aweber to getresponse soon

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This thread has changed my thinking with list building. As I want to invest my ad spend into that than just trading affiliate offers with my paid traffic.

I was with Aweber a few years ago. Then I went to Imnica mail but they kept doing global restrictions on any email address that had a hard bounce.....trouble was many emails were still valid including 2 emails addresses I used to seed the list to test deliverability. So I stopped using them as I don't like a service that permanently "bans" an email address because of their faulty hard bounce detection system. I would rather use a system that does several hard bounce tests over a period of time before deleting from my list....just in case of various other glitches.

With an inhouse list building system what do I need to do to start? And what about spam or bogus spam complaints? ....how do I avoid them (NB I won't be spamming.....everything will be CANSPAM compliant)

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I use Aweber, and can't fault it. I can see the downside of the amount you can send them, but this hasn't put me off. The plus-side as well is you can integrate it with loads of things.
Although I use it for info emails for my products, so not using aff links.

I think as long as you do double opt-in and have an opt-out button, you shouldn't need to worry, or have I got this wrong?

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- aweber banned me, only legit stuff -- people think the "Spam" button is the same as unsubscribe so fuck aweber
- icontact was good, but I created a new biz that was against their TOS, so they wouldn't let me send content about that new biz
- went to paramountcommunication.com - they're not big with online marketing people -- but they handled Ron Paul's campaigns and a lot of other political groups. We will see how it goes, so far seems very feature rich

P.s. I hear good things about getresponse.com -- if u want something like aweber and icontact but better lol

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I agree with this.

I used Aweber for years and then decided to try arpReach with Amazon SES.

So far so good. The built in stats aren't great, but deliverability is fine and you have complete control.

Just as a note, at the start, Amazon made me jump through a few hoops to make sure I was complying with their guidelines. Just repeat back to them what the guidelines say, stating that you comply.

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