(Or… “DAP vs MailChimp”, “DAP vs. GetResponse”, …. “DAP vs 3rd-Party-List-Service”)

We often get asked why use Aweber (or other third-party list service) when DAP itself is an autoresponder. So here’s a brief overview of when and why it makes sense to use DAP or Aweber.

Why Aweber

DAP is not an email service like Aweber.

DAP is just a tool – like Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

If your inexpensive shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server, in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether. Your customers never get your email. Your campaign suffers. Your conversion plunges. This won’t happen with Aweber.

Aweber (and other premier email service providers) have staff on hand just for this purpose. Their core business is about email deliverability. They spend a lot of time, money and resources dealing with regular ISP’s (like AOL and SBC) to make sure their lists – and their reputation – remain clean. Which is also probably why they shut down large lists without much of a warning to you, and do other similar crazy stuff.

I guess it works for them – and the other Aweber users, because when you send out an email through your Aweber list, it almost always gets there in your recipient’s inbox. Which is very cool. And which is why they also charge so much for their service.

But if you can’t afford their high fees, then you can of course use DAP’s built-in email autoresponder, whose deliverability is only as good as your host’s spam reputation Of course, you can always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like Fusemail.com or AuthSMTP.com (which we use ourselves) to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the next best thing to using a service like Aweber.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a decent web host. We ourselves use just DAP and AuthSMTP.com to send out emails to all of our users. DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (most web hosts limit you to 300 outgoing emails/hour). We also use multiple SMTP servers from our own other lesser-used web sites, all combined to be able to send thousands of emails an hour.

When it comes to features, here’s what DAP does *not* have that more expensive services like Aweber and GetResponse provide.

Advantage: DAP

• Unlimited Autoresponders
• Unlimited emails for free (no limit on how large your list can grow – so practically free, since you’ve already paid for DAP)
• No additional cost for this service – part of DAP
• Add same email to multiple Autoresponders (DAP special)
• Email throttling so as to not exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits
• Ability to merge member data – like password – into emails (DAP only – you can’t do this if you use a 3rd party list service)

Advantage: Aweber and the others

• Ability to track open rates
• Ability to track click-through rates (coming in a future version)
• Ability to automatically send out your newly published blog posts as a broadcast (coming in a future version)
• DAP has no “Pretty Form” generators like Aweber & Getresponse (coming in a future version)

So given a choice, here are your options in the exact order listed below:

1) DAP + Aweber: Match made in heaven

2) DAP + 3rd Party List Services: 2nd best option

3) DAP + Your Web Host: Very usable and workable option as long as you are hosting with a decent web host.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.