ListWire Free Auto-responder Review
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It's one thing to use Article Marketing to drive prospects to your website, but quite something else to persuade them to buy from you! Statistics say that you may need to present your sales message up to seven times before a prospect trusts you enough to part with any money. So it makes sense to capture their contact details and send a series of informative messages telling them more about the benefits of your product. While it might make sense in theory, it is impractical to do this manually for all but the tiniest business. That is where an auto-responder becomes an essential part of your online marketing tools, and it is usual to pay a few dollars a month for a decent quality auto-responder. There are many good quality auto-responders on the market. The best-known ones are probably GetResponse and Aweber. In my online career I have used several of different brand of auto-responder, and usually found that the lower priced ones were perfectly adequate for my needs. After all, until your business gets well and truly off the ground you don't want any extra the costs to eat into your profits. Another option is to try ListWire, for free.
The promotional material will tell you more (click the banner above), but in brief it promised to be a fully-functioning autoresponder, with unlimited prospects, unlimited broadcasts and unlimited follow-ups. This it certainly delivered, which was a pleasant surprise! With List Wire you can also create subscription forms for adding your own website, or blog, and the "SqueezeFrame" system allows you to add a subscription form to your website, even if you don't know a thing about uploading webpages, editing HTML, or using an FTP program. As I was already paying a monthly auto-responder cost, and hovering on the verge of having to upgrade to the next price level, it made sense to grab a free copy of Listwire to try it out.
I currently have a requirement to started set up a list to sell a different product, so this was the ideal opportunity to test-drive List Wire and here are my findings to date. Initially I expected to log-in and be presented with the usual "One-Time" offer to upgrade to a non-crippled product. These are a real annoyance to me. Before I part with money I'd like to try the product out. It always strikes me that the one-time offers are presented because the product is so bad you'd never pay for it after you'd tried it. Not always the case, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I digress….
At first I was a little wary, because there was a video from the author (Gary Ambrose) promoting his List Building course, and I was beginning to think "Here we go again", but refreshingly I was able to continue without making a purchase. (In fact I may actually buy the course later, when I've more fully assessed the software and quality of the author's work.) So, within minutes I was trying out defining my first list. Initial impressions – based just on creating a list and adding a few prospects and a couple of follow-up messages – are that the software is fast, easy to use and does everything I want it to do so far. I found it intuitive to use and was up and running within minutes. First with a test message to a spare email address of my own, and then adding newly generated prospects.
One slight criticism is that it would be difficult to move an existing list away from your current auto-responder to Listwire because there's a limit of importing 10 names per day, and the subscribers must opt-in to the list again. Obviously this is to prevent mis-use, but it would be good to have a way round this for marketers who already have an "opted-in" list. However, the flip-side of this restriction is that using a double opt-in process for all subscribers ensures your list is clean and protects you from spam complaints. If this is a problem, try Aweber or – even better – have a GetResponse free trial.
List Wire also automatically takes care of sending your confirmation messages, handling removal requests, processing bounced and undeliverable messages, and unsubscribing prospects who might mistakenly mark one of your messages as junk, or spam. I wondered what the publisher's "angle" was for giving away such a quality product, and of course there is one. Firstly there is the offer of the course at initial login (as mentioned above), and secondly, when new prospects confirm their subscriptions, they are offered low-cost products. The upside of this is that it enables you to earn affiliate commissions too, but your readers – depending on the niche – may find it distracting to be confronted with adverts that bear no resemblance to the list they are subscribing to. Although I liked ListWire, I did eventually continue with GetResponse because I found it more flexible as my needs grew. The choice, as ever is yours, and you can try out both at no cost.
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Hello. Great article. The other day, I had registered for a website that would make a free squeeze page for my blog. It required me to enter an autoresponder name. This led me to Listwire which eventually led me to this article. I wanted an opinion. Is an autoresponder necessary? I am not running a business. It is a blog, written to get me referrals. This is the link to my blog
http://iwant2learn2earn.blogspot.com/
Please reply. Thanks.
Hi
I think it's useful to have a list, as it's said that your prospect needs to hear from you at least seven times before they have the confidence, in your case, to join a program with you.
I know that when I'm deciding whether to join a new program I'm far more likely to join with someone I know and have established a relationship with.
Actually you've prompted me to remember that I've found an auto-responder that I like better than Listwire. It's still free (to start with) and when you feel you're making enough money from your list you can upgrade.
There's also an affiliate program, so you could promote it on your blog as a freebie and earn from it in time as your subscribers join. Here's the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/338sj66
An even simpler approach would be to build your list using the program I review below:
http://www.articlesuncovered.com/review-of-smart-subscriber-newsletter/
There is code supplied so that you can add the sign-up form into your blog. This method has the further advantage that Ian will send out sales letters to your list with YOUR affiliate links in, so all you would need to do is promote it as a freeby on your blog, like I have done.
It's a free trial, so there's nothing to lose by putting it on your blog and see who signs up.