When it comes to building and mailing to an online list of subscribers, is a piece of software suitable or should you consider using one of the email marketing servces such as Aweber?

If you google auto responder software you will be overwhelmed by the number of results you get. However the chances are that most of these will not save you much time and will certainly not protect you against can-it spam legislation for which any breaches carry a serious punishment.

The time taken in setting up a piece of software is time that is wasted when a cheap professional service would mean that with a few clicks of a mouse would mean that you website is set up to collect all the subscribers you can send to it.

When I first went into online marketing I tried what seemed the cheaper option of using auto responder software. However I felt this to be a false economy due to the time I lost setting the thing running.

If you have several websites or mailing lists then services such as aweber or get response will allow you to manage them all from a single log in. Whereas auto responder software would need to be installed on each individual website making life a lot more complicated for you.

The most important thing any auto responder software can do is to be able to prove that you do not send unrequested junk mail – ie it needs to prove you only send messages to those that requested it = otherwise you could be prosecuted for sending spam.

The various services are so cheap and easy to use that I would never bother with auto responder software. I prefer to use my time on other more productive activities such as getting new visitors to my website.