Kick Start Your List Building Campaign With Vertical Response

This is a review of Vertical Response - You might have heard a lot of internet marketers go on about ‘list building’ and how ‘the money is in the list’. Boy has that term been excessively used; it’s no surprise, because it’s 100% true. More and more people are getting into blogging and into internet marketing, and the first thing they should be made to realize is that list building is probably the most important step they can take, into building a profitable business online.

If you’ve been around the blogosphere for a while, you might have come across email marketing and autoresponder service providers such as MailChimp or Aweber. Those are great tools to use and offer some great features; they’re also the most popular amongst bloggers and internet marketers. But I’d like to bring to your attention a smaller but more affordable service provided from Vertical Response; when I say small they’re not at all, but in comparison in regards to popularity amongst bloggers, they are somewhat compared to other services being used.

Vertical Response is one of the most successful email marketing service providers on the web; they have been providing email marketing services to businesses of all shapes and sizes since 2001. Vertical Response combines extensive experience, affordability with a full suite of self-service marketing solutions for your small business, including –

• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Event marketing
• Direct mail marketing
• Online surveys.

Their mission is to give small businesses and non-profit organizations the power to easily and affordably create, manage and analyze their own marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Vertical Response offers two pricing plans for their email marketing services.

Pay As You Go

Their Pay As You Go is the most convenient way to pay for your email marketing needs with Vertical Response, by simply purchasing email credits for the amount of emails you wish to send. If you have a list of only 500 then 500 email credits would suffice your needs. 1,000 email credits would cost you $15 at 1.5 cents per credit/ email. This means bloggers starting out with email marketing and list building can afford to start small and build their way up. See pricing per amount of credits below.

Pay Monthly

Vertical Response also offers a pay monthly plan where you can select a payment plan to suite your needs. If you prepay for a 12-month subscription, you can pay as little as $8.50 per month for up to 500 emails. See plan below.

Which ever plan you choose with Vertical Response you will benefit from –

• Free image hosting
• Customizable opt-in forms
• List management & segmentation tools
• Return on Investment (ROI) tracking and reporting
• Social Sharing with Twitter & Facebook and LinkedIn
• Free Customer Support and much more…

Building a List with Vertical Response using your WordPress Blog

If you think you need to be using Aweber or MailChimp for WordPress integration, you’ll be pleased to know that you can do the same with Vertical Response too. There is a nifty plugin available that will enable you to add a fully customized opt-in form to your WordPress blog sidebar. You can access this plugin from the directory or download here –

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vertical-response-newsletter-widget/

If you’re using the (in)spyr theme or Generate theme or a similar mobile responsive theme running on Genesis, you won’t need to run this plugin. You can easily add details from your opt-in form script into the widget and you’ll soon be collecting email addresses from your theme’s built-in opt-in.

Other Features

Here is a list of some of the other features you can come to expect from using Vertical Response for your list building and email marketing needs.

• 700+ Professionally designed templates
• Compatibility with Google Analytics
• Email wizard or use your own HTML
• Anti-spam checking
• Divert new subscribers to a landing page after completing opt-in and verifying (Ideal if you have an eBook or freebie to give your new subs)
• Data cleansing (Identifies duplicate, bouncing and invalid emails)

Conclusion

Whilst Vertical Response is no way as popular amongst bloggers as MailChimp or Aweber, they certainly provide an array of award winning features, tools and benefits to kick start your list building campaign. I should mention that the only feature that Vertical Response does not offer its users is an autoresponder service. Other wise it’s an affordable and reliable service.

I’ve been using Vertical Response since 2008 and as you know I’ve successfully managed to build a list of 1,000 email subscribers. If you’re just starting out with email marketing and list building, I’d really recommend using Vertical Response. If you feel you need to make use of an autoresponder, then you can always make use of Aweber or MailChimp at a later date and download your list to take with you. You can signup for Vertical Response email marketing here.