But I found out that the system gets quirky when you get up around 1,000 subscribers (actually 800 or more). ALSO, you should know that you are using your hosts "mailservers" to send out those emails to your list. What I didnt know at the time was that most host's mailservers get "blacklisted" all of the time.
And you know what? They are not in the email marketing business, and they dont really care. In fact, most of them will tell you straight out "that is a 3rd party script and we dont offer support for it" (ignoring the fact it is THEIR mail servers causing the problem).
To make a long story short, I found out that the majority of my subscribers were not getting my emails at all. As for Constant Contact and Topica, they have been blacklisted by certain major ISP's for years. Unless you have a close friend that signs up for your list and then TELLS you that they didnt get your email, you'll likely never know who isnt getting it.
When I switched to Aweber a couple of years ago, well - I was skeptical about spending $19.95/month after having my list set up free with my hosting account before. Of course, if you look at the pricing structure of Topica and Constant Contact, you'll see that as your list grows... they charge a whole lot more than 20 bucks!
Anyway, I decided to "go for it"... and that was the best decision I ever made. Like I said, I didnt realize how many people werent even getting my emails... but when I started publishing my newsletter through Aweber - my response rate went sky high!
People were replying to my newsletter, there was a huge spike in sales, etc - it was a BIG difference! Aweber is the industry leader in mailing list management... it IS their 'job' to make sure they stay whitelisted, and they continue to boast "the highest delivery rate in the industry".
That initial experience got me hooked - but it's all of their features that have kept me as a loyal customer. They provide very detailed stats, including how many people opened your email - or which links were clicked on in your message. They also tell you where each subscriber came from (which page or which link they used). They let you split-test subject lines, to see which one gets the highest "open rate" (which one gets more people to open the email). It's unreal what all they offer...
Of course, as already mentioned, you can set up as many lists as you want in one account. That is newsletters, autoresponders, you name it - it's unlimited. And now they have a brand new feature in our accounts called the Feed Broadcaster - anyone who has a blog will love this!
I have a post about it and an example on my own blog, which you can see here: http://clicknewz.blogspot.com/2005/12/f ... aster.html
This is my link to Aweber: http://sswt.aweber.com . You can sign up for the free trial, set up your own account, or even sign up for the affiliate program. I will get credit if you use my link, of course - which would just make my day
