Email Newsletters
9 Dec 2008
Recently I’ve had a couple of clients ask me for advice on email marketing or how best to send newsletters out to all their subscribers, and there’s also been some discussion about this on the Php London mailing list.
Looking around, and talking to other people, we have the following shortlist of recommended packages:
- Campaign Monitor – Hosted solution
- Constant Contact – Hosted solution
- Pommo – Open source
- Interspire Email Marketer – offers a choice of hosted, or install the software on your own site
Some clients are unhappy with the idea of paying a subscription to send emails, and would rather pay a larger one-off fee for unlimited use, or get their own software. Not a problem if we’re sending email to a relatively small number of subscribers (think hundreds, not thousands), but if your subscriber base is any larger then we’d want to start thinking very hard about spam controls and look at a hosted solution where the company in question is whitelisted (appears on list of acceptable or trusted sources, opposite of blacklisting known spammers)
And here’s a very helpful message from Marcus Bointon of http://www.smartmessages.net/
“The big downside of managing your own mailing system is establishing and maintaining a good sending reputation – it’s really hard to do, and takes a good 6 months to a year. For hotmail you need to be consistently sending them at least 1,000 messages per day to qualify for any kind of special treatment. That special treatment comes in the form of two services: The JMRP and SNDS services (both at postmaster.msn.com). Anyone can sign up for SNDS – it gives you stats on sending from one or more IPs to hotmail/winows live accounts. You get message and recipient counts, complaint count and rate, spamtrap counts, and an overall red/yellow/ green ‘quality’ rating for each IP. This doesn’t let you improve deliverability directly, but at least you get to see what is happening. The quality rating seems a bit vague – I’ve seen it green at 3% spam rate (very high), but red at 0.1% (about normal for clean lists).”