(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 servver, 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, 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 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. 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 SMTP.com 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 Aweber only.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a good web host. We ourselves use just DAP and Dreamhost‘s email servers to send out emails to all of our users. And 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 (dreamhost’s limit is 300 emails/hour, I think). We use multiple SMTP servers from our own other web sites, all combined to be able to send a few thousand emails per hour.

So given a choice, here are your email options in the exact order listed.

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 host.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.