If all of them have similar features, how do choose the right one?

Some important features

• Creating a mailing list takes a lot of time and might be essential for your e-mail marketing success. While collecting subscribers and sending e-mail messages, it’s important that as many messages as possible have to reach the subscribers mailbox. Bigger companies are more trusted and invest more time an money to prevent that their mail servers are getting black-listed.
• If your list is not very big (~1000 subscriber) and you don’t have a lot of campaigns, your partner should offer pre-paid plans. If you take a monthly plan, check that the maximum amount of subscribers is not to big.
• If you’re not able to create all the forms and templates, you need a service provider which offer these features out of the box. If you have an international list or campaigns, multiple languages should be supported.
• A better service provider let you follow strict usage policies. If you need to create campaigns for your existing list, check if the list is fully accepted (before you start customizing forms and templates). On the other side, if the service provider accept any kind of mailing list and or campaign, it might be possible that their mail servers are black-listed frequently.
• All services should offer double opt-in features for your subscriptions. Check if you are able to send an auto-respond message to your subscribers.

In the past year I was able to try three of the bigger services; iContact, MailChimp and CampaignMonitor. AWeber looks pretty good and earns a lot of trust and I’m sure you will not waste your time if you try them as well. They don’t offer a free trial, but at the moment while I’m writing this review they offer the first month for only $1 ($19 for the following months).

iContact – E-mail marketing simplified

I tried iContact first a year ago and actually it works as they offer the service on their website. You can open a trial account to setup your mailing list and templates/forms. If you want to import a bigger list you need to pay first. They offer only monthly plans, “pay as you go” options are not possible. They have all the features like other professional companies, but it looks to me they didn’t update their control panel for the last 3 years (the WYSIWYG editor is very ugly). Every mail message I send, got the iContact branding in the footer, which you can’t remove. I have the idea that they don’t have a strong usage policy because I got NEVER complains for high percentage of un-subscriptions, high bounce rates or complains. They offer a survey function (I never tried) and they support several 3rd party plugins (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SalesForce…)

MailChimp – Email Marketing and Email List Manager

MailChimp is the best service for a beginning mailing list, because they offer a free plan for lists with less than 500 subscribers. They offering great and easy to use tools for creating lists and campaigns. With a lot of 3rd party plugins (Facebook, SalesForce, Magento, Paypal and many more) they are one of the biggest email marketing partners. Using MailChimp you can go for monthly pricing or “pay as you go”. The last option is for people sending less frequently a newsletter to their members. Another features are: Custom responder messages, complete forms for your website, powerful API system (offering complete example code), Google Analytics integration, advanced reports and much more. They have a very strict policy on abusing their system, will say don’t use them for a mailing list you have bought somewhere on the Internet. Very unique is their affiliate scheme, if someone has joined MailChimp via your affiliate link and the user has upgraded to a paid account, both parties getting a $30 bonus (new user and the affiliate). You can’t turn this bonus into cash, but maybe is an opportunity to run your (bigger) mailing list for free.

CampaignMonitor – Email marketing software for web designers

The first thing you will notice after free trial sign-up is that you login into some kind of reseller area. With CampaignMonitor it’s possible to create mailing lists completely white-label (even for the user of the back-end). Against MailChimp the back-end has less features, but you’re able to create your campaigns with custom templates or using the premium templates offered by CampaignMonitor. They offer monthly and “pay as you go” plans and their usage policy is somewhere between the one from iContact and the policy from MailChimp. While their back-end is very modern and functional, they don’t offer enough features for lists in languages other than English. If you need to setup your list in a different language, you should try the API which is powerful as well.

If you start a new mailing list, most of the products or services should work for you, but if you need a provider for your existing list you need to test them first.
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The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories.

For my first test I created some Adsense code for my new referral ad and placed it on some web page and hello! These ads are looking the same as the regular Adsense text ads. Nice this way the visitor will just recognize some ads by Google.

Good points:

• Easy to use interface, any experienced Adsense publisher doesn’t need to learn (again) how to get the ad code on some web page.
• A good amount of categories for almost every type of website.
• The payment is done together with the earnings from other Adsense products (you can reach faster the minimum amount)

Bad points:

• The categories are spammed by unrelated advertisers (I’m sure some editor will remove these ads after some days but in the meantime you will publish some yunk)
• Only text ads are available (at the moment), no special ad variations
• No contact to the advertiser (like on publisher networks like commission junction)

I don’t have good results with the old Google referral products and know that monetizing a website with PPA (pay per action) ads needs much more work than adding some PPC ads to your website. I know a lot of companies supporting their affiliates with the result of higher conversions. I’m sure that every Adsense publisher is able to generate better earnings using PPC ads from Google.

Related links:
Check this thread with some guide for affiliate marketing.
Forum thread about Adsense referral 2.0 at webdigity.com.Similar Posts:

• Some nice Google Adsense updates
• AdSense for Domains, just another Domain Parking Service?
• Monetize your website with AuctionAds