Vertical Response

By Bradley Charbonneau | Filed under Email, Help, Software

I’ve been looking for some time for mailing list software that didn’t charge a monthly fee, but rather on a per email or per recipient basis. Please use the link below to sign up for Vertical Response and you’ll get 25 emails free to test with. After that, it’s around one penny per recipient for mass emailings. No monthly fees, no sign-up fees.

Currently, I usually use PHP List (help), but there are a few issues that some of my clients have come across:

• Ease of use: once you get a template set up, it’s great, but it’s just plain not all that user friendly
• Statistics: not that accurate; maybe third-party stats better as on a third-party domain?
• Spam: difficult to not get into spam boxes, maybe third-party is on more “white lists.”

That last point, spam, is quite important. If you’re sending out from your own domain (you@yourdomain.com) and some AOL user on your list labels you as a spammer, there’s a chance that your domain would be put on a blacklist and thus none of your emails to any AOL users would go through. Worse yet, depending on whether they just labeled your domain (yourdomain.com) or your whole IP address (202.34.33.458) as spammers, many, many other domains on that same IP address will be labeled spammers by AOL and none of their emails will get through either. You won’t be making lots of friends … ;-)

Of course, it’s hard to argue with free. But if you’re labeled a spammer and your emails don’t go through, is free “worth it”?