Autoresponders are an essential part of internet marketing.

Most people – including myself – normally suggest Aweber. It’s long established and has an excellent relationship with the main email companies, so your messages are almost certain to get delivered. It also copes with very large quantities of emails if and when your business gets to giant numbers.

But all that comes at a price and when you’re starting out, costs seem to mount up quicker than income arrives.

If that applies to you, there is a free WordPress autoresponder plugin that works well and has some scaleability as well.

There are quite a few options but the one I’ve tested and found to work well is called BFT Autoresponder. You can search for it in your WordPress control panel and install it from there.

It’s easy to set up.

The settings page is simple:

• You enter the “from” email address that you want to appear in all messages
• Choose single or double opt-in (where people have to confirm that they’ve signed up before being added to your list)
• Optionally enter a page that they’re redirected to after they’ve registered – you could send this to a thankyou page or an affiliate offer for instance
• Tick boxes so that you can get notified when people subscribe or unsubscribe
• The code for the signup form or (for the technically challenged!) a WordPress shortcode that you can put anywhere on a page and the signup box appears

Which is all the functionality you need from an autoresponder as far as the setup is concerned.

The next screen allows you to add subscribers manually.

I don’t recommend doing that – there’s a reason that the big companies like Aweber don’t allow you to do that and it’s to do with deliverability and keeping the right side of the Can Spam laws. But the option is there if you want it and it saves having to go through the signup process if you want to quickly add your own email for testing (but I’d suggest you use the signup form, just to test that it works).

There’s also a bulk import option – not something that should be used very often but if you’re importing emails from a paid-for account that should be OK.

And – very important – an export option.

Your email list is valuable!

It’s well worth making it a habit to export it regularly.

The part of the autoresponder that you’re going to use most often is the messages section.

It’s here that a WordPress plugin shows its weakness.

The list of existing messages soon turns into a very long screen as each one is in the same format as a post on your blog.

You can use the small chevron at the bottom right of each message box to reduce the screen size but that’s about it.

That said, it’s not a major issue unless you have a long sequence of messages and want to edit lots of them.

Each message can be set to be sent a certain number of days after the previous one. The increment is in days, not hours, so you can’t easily send out more than one message per day to your list unless you use the broadcast option.

You can also set messages to send out on a specific day in the future – you could use this if you wanted to send a broadcast message to your list in a few days time.

Formatting of the messages is taken care of by the standard WordPress text edit box so you can use bold, italics and colours easily.

Broadcast messages (called newsletters) are sent immediately and are formatted the same way.

There are some limitations with the free version but there is a paid upgrade available which is a one-off price.

The upgrade allows you to have multiple lists and – possibly more important – the option to stagger sending out emails.

Which brings us to the biggest limitation on any self-hosted autoresponder:

Your website host.

Almost all shared hosting plans have limits on the number of emails you can send in a set amount of time.

Often the limits are buried somewhere in the small print or you just have to find out what they are by experimenting and hoping that you don’t trigger any problems.

The limits vary by host but are usually a maximum quantity of emails per day and also a maximum “burst rate” of emails you can send per minute or hour.

The free version of the autoresponder plugin doesn’t allow any control over this, so when your list starts to grow you’ll need to pay for the upgrade.

It’s a nice problem to have but one that you need to be aware of.

If you’d like to know more about keeping your internet marketing costs down, I’ve created a video series that shows you how you could run a complete, fully functional, internet marketing business for the cost of a domain.

You can find out more about the course here.