Kezz

So I just received an email, a pretty nice looking one too, from a mailing list I am on with "Powered by Mad Mimi" at the bottom. I thought ooooh an automated email from a business I respect, through an autoresponder I haven't yet heard of.

I checked it out and it looks pretty good! They allow up to 100 contacts without charge, and after that it's only $8 for 500, $10 for 1000 and so on with a sliding scale.

I know everybody mentions MailChimp as a good free provider, which I'm sure they are, but they state clearly they do not allow affiliate marketers or internet marketers. I wouldn't want to get all nice and setup with them only to get the boot when things were going well.

I read through Mad Mimi's information and couldn't find any similar stipulation. The only thing you can't do is "distribute illegal contests, pyramid schemes, chain letters, or multi-level marketing campaigns".

I searched here and found that only two members seem to have mentioned it, and given that they count clients from Squidoo, Microsoft and Virgin amongst their customer base, I thought this might be a stellar find for IMers.

I'll be trying it shortly because those prices are pretty darn attractive up against Aweber. I'll report back on my results when I get around to it.

LINKY: Mad Mimi Email Marketing : Create, send & track emails with Mad Mimi.

Oh and they have a 25% recurring affiliate commission. I suspect that "powered by Mad Mimi" link at the bottom of the email might be an affiliate link. If so, sweet.

Jagged

Well....leave's me out then...lol

Kezz

Yeah I know huh? There goes my "You just won the lottery!" campaign, pffft....

NightWriter

Mailchimp doesn't allow affiliate or internet marketers... What's the point of a newsletter except to market something...

I'm not doubting your statement... I'm just kind of shocked.

I tried them - didn't like them. Didn't like their web form. Didn't like the organization or lack thereof, had some difficulty with their terminology and navigating the site. And, the whole screaming chimp thing was annoying when I was really trying to get something done...

What would the Mailchimp people expect you to use their autoresponders for, if not some kind of marketing? I'm curious.

NightWriter

I'll give you a couple of freebies... www.freeautobot.com - can't do campaigns, though, only pretty much unlimited serial responders. Don't let those pop-ups bother you, it's not bad once you get past that.

www.sendfree.com is actually free if you only want to set up one sequential autoresponder and deliver no more than 12 messages. They have other features, but you have to pay for the broadcasting, etc. They have a neat-looking exchange program there...

WhoIsBenjamin

very cool of ya' to share this with me,
thanks.

Whatever happened to the "buy me a beer" option?

Letterman

Sounds interesting but let us see how it all works out... Hopefully Kezz
will keep us informed & updated.

Kezz

Yeah I thought the same thing when I read that in their terms of use. I suppose all email marketing is internet marketing really, but who isn't ever ever ever going to promote an affiliate offering in their emails? They also say NO to a bunch of entire industries. Here's their list:

• Illegal goods or services
• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Get-rich-quick or work-at-home schemes
• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content
• Gambling services, products or gambling education
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Credit repair, get-out-of-debt content
• Mortgages and/or Loans
• Real estate prospecting or listing
• Nutritional Supplements
• Pornography or nudity in content
• Adult novelty items or references in content

After that, what's even left?

I guess they're more about actual straight up newsletters? Like the bi-monthly roundup of over 70's lawn bowls action, or something...

farotto

Hi.
For anybody looking for a free autoresponder, autobot and sendfree are not the only ones, and are not the best, in my opinion.
I searched for 10 among the best online autoresponders offering a free service and I classified them according to their features.
Here is the final list of the first 5 of them
1) Response 2.0
2) Getresponse
3) GWA
4) JV-Marketers
5) Sendfree

If you want to see the complete results, they are available at
autoresponder.free.fr

Mark Owens

Free autoresponders are great I guess but because of the fact that they're free, people abuse them a lot. This means that inbox rates may not be as high as other services such as Aweber and GetResponse.

Regardless, they're pretty good to get started with but I highly recommend going with a more popular service because they're popular for a reason

iYingHang

Well,

Why not Aweber?

Cheers,
iYingHang

Kezz

Because I'm a cheapskate. :P

I'm with Aweber right now and I don't have any problem with them at all. Their service is excellent. However, if I can find something that meets my needs for half the price, seems like a good idea to use it, yes?

igorhelpsyousucceed

Why would you go for a free auto responder
if you have something as good as Aweber. The next
best thing is infusion soft, but it's 299/month, so I understand
why most don't go for it.

But aweber is pretty much affordable for anyone and it's
also really-really-really easy to use, customize and productive.

And the fact that you can email unopened the second time
is the tie braker against any free autoresponder.

Igor

Kezz

Bear in mind this isn't free as in free for anything. It's free for the first 100 contacts and then extremely competitive after that. It has some solid feedback so if I find it can do what I want, I'll save the $$

Of course if it's no good, nothing else matters. But, it's a matter of testing it isn't it. You can never find a better option if you're not willing to try things.

ArticlePrince

So, MailChimp is perfect if you have less than 500 subscribers to your glass paperweights list that don't want to buy anything :-p

xiaophil

It's funny because there's more than one way to interpret Mailchimp's TOS.

I took it to mean that while they prohibit sending emails about affiliate marketing, you can still be doing affiliate marketing and remain within their TOS.

e.g. Promoting dog training (as an affiliate) is OK, Promoting affiliate marketing is a no no.

Does that make sense?

Phil

Kezz

It's possible, but they did list affiliate marketing as a prohibited business / industry type. You could be right. I'm thinking it might be prudent to err on the side of caution though.

Randy Smith

When you say you "took it to mean" - would that be a safe thing to use as a defense if you lost your list?
Or have you written and asked for clarification?

It seems to be always best to check anything these days with so many rules popping up all the time....lol


Randy

Grapho

The company I work for uses MailChimp and to the best of my knowledge never promoted any affiliate product in any mail -it uses the mail list for brand awareness, to keep prospects hot, etc.

So it is internet marketing, as you say, just a different flavour of IM than the one this fourm is about.

Kezz

Right you are. I wasn't very clear - I meant who as in amongst the folks I'm talking to here. Most WF members will want to at least have the option I suspect.

NightWriter

I must not have read their TOS very well, at all... So... what if you are promoting your own brand and your own products, but you also have a list to support your own affiliates that is Company X's Affiliates Newsletter.

Do you suppose that would be okay?

I have to say, I don't understand all of the anti-affiliate marketing stuff I see. I think affiliate marketing is a good thing... like everything it must be done with integrity, but is essentially a very positive thing. Why would they or anyone else want to discourage fair and honest commerce?

AM Faisal

If the delivery rate is as good as Aweber, then it will be a really great find.

Kezz will hopefully keep us updated on this.

marcdonovan

I have a totally free service setup at vertuso dot com (cant post links yet - newbie). It is brand new, so a little ragged around the edges, but working on it daily. Give it a shot and let me know what you would like to see fixed/added/whatever.

jasondinner

NO!!!! It is not a good idea to be a "cheapskate" (as you put it) when it comes to email list management.

It's not something you want to nickel and dime about.

One extra affiliate sale per month paying $20 commission will cover your Aweber cost.

- Jason

Kezz

I did preface that with "if I can find something that meets my needs". Cheaper doesn't always mean worse. There can be any number of reasons that a service prices itself lower than its competitors.

Many of the best services, products and applications I've used have been inexpensive or even free. For example, I first discovered Wordpress and Joomla when I was tasked by a deep pocketed former employer to find the best CMS for the company to use. Despite having a blank check to throw away, I found that purely on their merits these apps were far far far superior as website management tools to some other services that were putting on the extra shmooze to get our business and cost thousands per year to access.

You can't judge a service either positively or negatively until you actually try it. Now I'm not saying whether these guys are good or not, because I haven't tested them so I don't know. But what I am saying is reserve your judgement until you have more information than just pricing alone.

Who knows, maybe they'll even meet my needs better than Aweber does. If they don't do what I want, of course I won't use them, but if they do I will. Either way, I'll never know if I don't give them a chance.

maureensuggitt

hey kezz why don't you set up a dummy campaign and post a link here so the rest of us can see what mad mimi looks like in the sign up and unsubscribe modes that most customers would be seeing?
also interested in what type of templates are available new or outdated?

ForeignProfessor

Some b*stards write stuff for fun, as a hobby! I don't understand this myself, but this is the internet, and there are a few twisted folk out there who don't just type for coin..

(I'm shuddering right now)

NateRivers

I love aweber, and am happy to pay for it each month. The ease and effectiveness of the split test feature it worth it alone.

Alexa Smith

Then you got it wrong, honestly.

Let's be really clear and unambiguous about this, for the benefit of anyone reading this thread who doesn't quite appreciate the position, because this can be a potentially disastrous mistake for people to make.

There are many Warriors here, who have commented in other threads that Mailchimp found out that they were using their Mailchimp autoresponder for affiliate marketing, by sending out affiliate-links to people on their list, and Mailchimp closed them down and they could no longer access their lists. And when they tried to raise "helpdesk" tickets to query this and find out if there was anything they could do about it, just to recover their lists, they were ignored completely. And when they eventually managed to get an email reply from Mailchimp, it was to tell them that there'd be no further discussion or correspondence because "support is for account-holders only" which they weren't any more, after Mailchimp had closed them down.

There are many of these people, all saying the same thing.

You and I both know perfectly well that they're not all making up the same story. They'd have absolutely no incentive at all to do this!

So don't anyone imagine that there's some "other reading" of the terms of service that makes it ok to do affiliate marketing there. There isn't.

Absolutely not. It's wrong. Sorry.

Affiliate marketing is expressly prohibited in the terms of service (quoted above).

jasonmorgan

Nice find.

It's a big internet. Not everybody is building a list or emailing people for the same reasons.

You can promote your own products and all sorts of things with mail chimp. They just don't want the WF style of internet marketers who do nothing but flood their list with junk after crap after junk. Sending out affiliate links to your list is profitable but it's also bottom feeder marketing.

Step away from internet marketing forums and websites and take a look at the big picture.

stressjudo

jv-marketers.com

Is that still viable?
I had been using it successfully for a few years.
This year, though, I can't login. People to my squeeze page tell me they get an error. And the site has not responded to TWO support tickets.

Are they out of business?
Did they change something?
I have tried joining with another email and nothing.

Thank you

Lloyd Buchinski

Actually try it before you form an opinion based on one tiny bit of information alone?

I really enjoyed that. As far as I'm concerned cheap is a powerful positive force. The old 'you get what you pay for' bit of garbage has been getting to me lately. A couple of times I've typed 'you're kidding! How much do you spend on oxygen?'

It will be true sometimes that the best item in a category is the most expensive one, but the old wallet will take the kind of beating given to LA freeway pavement if you just treat that as a blind rule. (Something that you follow without thinking about it.)

bitriot

I run a mad mimi list with about 600 subscribers. It is a pretty tight service and I think it is one of the best out there in terms of support and ease of use.

That said, many of the typical IM oriented email features like Drip Campaigns and Auto Responders are a small upsale no matter what level of base service you are subscribed to.

pacesetter007

Hello, do you know anything about their delivery rate? Again, is there any information telling if their messages go straight into the receiver's inbox and not 'spam'? I'll be interesting in this info cos it's what determines a good autoresponder in my opinion.
Thanks.
Tim.

Lloyd Buchinski

That's nice to hear, but what do you mean 'auto responders are a small upsell'??? I thought it was an auto responder.

I have to put one together soon and just checked on a big name, expensive, often recommended around her AR company to see if they could import a list from madmimi if the going gets tough, and that page won't come up on their site. (sigh) So much for 'you get what you pay for.' Tried a few times since my last post.

I don't really have time to wait and see if Kezz checks it out thoroughly and reports back. (But nice strategy for the people that mentioned that )

This thread is timely for me. Thanks for bringing it up Kezz. There's going to be a small wham when I slam my pointer down on the thank you button as soon as I post this.

best wishe

nvs74191

I use listwire.com. Had no complaints with it till now.

Gary_The_Ace

Hey all,

The only free autoresponder you need to consider is ListWire.com ...

It's really free, there are no limitations on the number of contacts, and the delivery rates rival all the paid services out there.

I really thought this thread was going to be about ListWire.com when I opened it... I guess that means it's time for me to step up the marketing a little bit.

-Gary Ambrose

PaulEMoore

LOL! I'm in the same boat!

James Campbell

Update: Also just came across this in their TOS http://madmimi.com/legal/terms

"If at any time your campaign is flagged as SPAM by an AOL recipient, Mad Mimi reserves the right to cancel your account without notice."

This worries me because quite a few people use the spam button instead of unsubscribing.

Just came across this one the other day and it looks pretty great: http://www.campaigner.com

I'm testing it currently, and it is free for 30 days. After which the prices are extremely reasonable.

James

Jesus Perez

AOL members are the worst. They hit spam all the time. Stay far away from madmimi. Far, far away. Mail chimp too. Just spend a few bucks on Aweber or GetResponse.

tsgeric

Gary, doesn't ListBandit promote Email Aces as the autoresponder they use?

novac

2 problems that I see here:
Think of all the software programs that many of us buy that somehow only integrate with Aweber or Get Response, etc.
And-
Have any of you ever gone through the nightmares of switching ARs?

How does List Machine, Vertuso, Mail Chimp, or Mad Mimi work with these problems?

tsgeric

Yeah, that was what I was wondering. If something "integrates" with aweber ,does that mean it will support aweber easily/natively, and something else more clunkily/manually, or does it mean that somehow these programs don't work with non-aweber autoresponders at all?

tsgeric

Hi, I just went to download the free report , and got an error message ("Limit Reached. Sorry, we were unable to process your subscription request because this member's account has already reached the allowed limit. Please contact Giovanni Farotto at blogautoposter@free.fr about this problem."), interestingly, hosted at Response2.0 - isn't that the service that this free report rates at #1? :-)

Chris Worner

I suppose you can back that statement up with verifiable facts?

Chris

Gary_The_Ace

Feel free to test it for yourself if you'd like... that said, many people think that the paid services offer better delivery rates because they market that message... this is a marketing message board... you'd think this group would be smarter than to just blindly believe.

jasondinner

WHOA Alexa!! Panties in a bunch much over Mailchimp?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

However, I do agree with you.

I created an account just to try them out for a side project and found them very unfriendly to marketers who knew how to and wanted to customize their own forms.

In fact, they don't even give you form code to customize them yoruself. They make
you use some 3rd party service which costs money.

What the point of all of that is I could not tell you.

But that coupled with the fact that I couldn't recommend relevant products and services
to my own leads that I got with my own efforts made me realize that they weren't a good
fit for me either.

If you're looking for free, Gary's http://ListWire.com is most likely your best bet.

Knowing Gary and his prowess at email marketing, it's probably just as good, if not better
than a lot of the services we pay for and swear by.

- Jason

Lloyd Buchinski

Since this was about the third mention of it in this thread, I checked it out. For anyone else interested, here are a few things that it took me awhile to find out.

Mostly it sounds like it does the job well. They are confirmed opt in only which impressed me at first. Took a pause from fitting their code into a page to visit their forum and was a bit disappointed about this.

"After a subscriber hits the summit button s/he is redirected to a Listwire ad, and has to click a link to be taken to my redirect URL.

And, after hitting the confirming link s/he is taken to a listwire ad, and has to go through the "No thanks" process to reach my download link.

How can I eliminate or delete those ad e-mails. They are distracting.

I know that Listwire is FREE and those ads bring revenue to the site. But there is no upgrade option to eliminate this aspect of the service."

So it is a bit more than just including a text ad with each email. Going through that 'no thanks' process is something that not everyone will be able to get done, and it isn't fun for the people who do it. (me for example)

It would be nice if that information was supplied up front, but no...

Gary_The_Ace

This isn't true... they're not taken to a ListWire ad, they're taken to a page that asks the user to confirm their subscription. This is being done specifically so that your users are more likely to confirm their subscription, and I've yet to run a test, or even hear of anyone who has run a test, where this specific type of page didn't dramatically increase confirmation rates.

In short, we're a service that deals with a lot of newer marketers, and in order to help make sure they get the highest confirmation rates possible, we include a "please confirm your subscription" page.

You mean, just like the same thing that appears on GetResponse, but that no one complains about? Well, I think you're missing something... these "ads" actually put people on to YOUR lists a a List Wire member. We aren't making a dime on these, and several members are adding 20-30 new subscribers a day to their accounts through our cooperative list building system.

Shocking right... a free service that's actually free. There's no upgrade option, and that is clearly disclosed in the video on the home page explaining the service. It's free, as in, you can't pay for it... isn't that what free means?

We show one advertisement, one time, to your prospects... then, that's the end of it. And, we're always testing new ways to make this process both more profitable for us, and less intrusive for the subscribers...

That said, it's one offer, one time, and then you can mail to your prospect for years to come at absolutely no cost... and, the offer is shown after subscribe, and after confirm as not to interrupt the subscription process in any way.

As for the text ads in the emails...

iContact, InfusionSoft, Campaigner and many other paid service include a graphic indicating the service provider in the outbound emails... the difference is, you're not paying hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per year to use our service. Also, if someone is referred to us through that link, you actually benefit by having more opportunity to gain 100% free, double-optin, targeted subscribers added to your list through our cooperative list building system.

I'm not going to back down, because I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that ListWire is the best free autoresponder service ever created, and I'd put it up there with the best free services that have ever been offered in our field... period. That may sound like a bold statement to some... but, I firmly believe it's true.

And finally... there are 40 paid autoresponder providers out there who will gladly accept your money, but as far as I know, there's only one free provider with solid delivery rates, with unlimited followup messages, with the ability to broadcast, and that will allow you to build a list of unilimited size... without costing your a dime.

-Gary Ambrose

Lloyd Buchinski

Gary, just to clear up something. Most of that post wasn't mine, but I can see now that I wasn't very clear about it. The part in the quotes was something that I found in the listwire forums. At least when I was there yesterday, the comment hadn't been shot down and blown to pieces like that

Just went back and found the post here http://www.listwire.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=372

Anyway I appreciate your comments and especially since half the work is done already, I'll get this going and give it a try soon. Glad you cleared up a couple of things for me.

best wishes