Fee vs. Free, Part II



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Fee vs. Free, Part II
By Brian Alt

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Yesterday's article examined the advantages of both free and fee-based email list solutions and looked at the ever-present money/time trade-off in the email publishing world. If you missed it, that article is available here.

Today, we look at some of the features of fee-based list hosting that you simply won't find in most of the free solutions. They include:

Manual Addition of Members - Many free list hosting services do not allow you to add members to your list manually. They do this, of course, to prevent their lists from being used to send spam, but there are some legitimate reasons to add members as well, such as members sent to you from pay-per-subscriber directories or other third-party opt-in subscriber acquisition efforts. Free list hosting providers that force you to send an "invitation" or that simply don't allow manual additions prevent you from effectively using these third-party promotional techniques.

Ability to "Brand" Your List - Many fee-based list hosts allow you to pre-define the "To:", "From:", and other email header fields. This enables you to create a consistent format and image for your ezine. For more on accomplishing this, see this past Ezine-Tips article.

HTML Ezines - The fundamental problem with sending HTML email through free list hosts is their inability once again to customize the header information. In order to effectively send HTML-format ezines that will be interpreted correctly by all email clients that understand HTML, you will need to include ate least the following email header:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

Free email hosts make it very difficult if not impossible to accomplish the addition of this header, while many fee-based solutions (Lyris especially) make it a snap.

For a series of articles on the advantages of disadvantages of HTML-format email publications, click here.

"Failsafe" Unsubscribing - Many pro list hosts (again, those using the Lyris platform come immediately to mind) provide commands that will include a special unique unsubscription address for each subscriber. This allows subscribers to more easily remove themselves from your list, even if they are sending the unsubscription command from another email address than the one they subscribed under. This can be a huge time saver for the publisher who would otherwise have to deal with these unsubscription attempts manually.

You can see your own unique unsubscription address at the bottom of the email version of Ezine-Tips. (I'm not encouraging you to use it ;-)

Personalization - Many fee-based list hosts provide "mail merge" commands that allow you to include each subscriber's name or email address in their copy of the mailing. More sophisticated (and espensive) solutions will even allow you to sort or mail to your list based on your subscribers' age, physical location, or other demographics, assuming you have collected this information. All of these features are absent in free list hosting services.

Lyris is the list hosting platform with which I am most familiar, and which provides the majority of the features outlined above. However, similar services offer many of the same features for around the same price. For a list of free and fee-based list hosting providers, click here.

Ezine-Tips for January 10, 2001

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Fee vs. Free, Part IIBy Brian Alt

Fee vs. Free, Part II
By Brian Alt