Email marketing software/service?

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm hoping I might be able to get some recommendations of good email management software or services as we're looking to replace our temperamental- and very limited- custom emailer script with something better. Ideally we're looking for bounce handling, reporting, etc.- nothing too exotic, but something more than just send functionality. I've looked at a few products and haven't been too impressed and was wondering if any of you have any that you'd recommend for sending newsletters, product announcements, etc.

Here's to a better 2009 for all of us :sunny:

Strangely enough, im also looking for a new bulk mailer script that has better reporting features so id also be interested in getting some software reccomendations to handle this :)

Regards,

Lee

If you want to host it yourself I recommend dadamailproject.com (formerly mojo). It fairly easy to setup & use. Be careful what domain you put it on though in case you accidentally end up on a blacklist.

If you want a hosted solution, I have used campaigner.com. Their templates leave a lot to be desired but it's pretty effective and affordable.

I believe constantcontact.com is pretty popular too. I'm not sure if they handle adult mail though.

There are many others too.

we use campaigner.com/gotmarketing.com as well, love it. not cheap, but the mail gets to the users and we see great returns from it.

We have used SubscribeMePro, a script, got us blocks in too many places. we also have user PHPlist, it's a nice program, but you have to deal with their links on your emails for their email program. PHPlist, Also did not help with us being blocked with ISPs as well.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the suggestions! I had looked at companies like Constant Contact and Vertical Response before and made the assumption that they probably didn't handle adult content.

I feel more comfortable hosting our own solution but may take a look at campaigner.com as it might be a nice, simple way to get going quickly- depending on the cost. I looked at PHPlist a while back and didn't love it. I'll take a look at dadamail though and see what it's got.

Also, for anyone else looking, a former colleague recommended Mailing List Manager Pro and Oempro. I ran through the demo for Oempro and found it to be a little clunky and not intuitive, while MLM Pro looks a little easier to use. I may actually trial that product as I've already had a good interaction with some of their technical staff regarding some pre-purchase questions. If I think of it I'll post back here once I get something working.

Thanks again!

Do Not Use Constant Contact. I say this very firmly, we used constantcontact.com's service.
They only allow 1 out of every 1,000 users to mark the email as spam. For instance, you have 4,000 recipients in your email blast, 4 or more of those recipients mark your email as spam, they will shut you off.
We have 6800 recipients. We had 9 guys mark the emails as spam. They shut us off.
We also told them up front that we do adult DVD product and website marketing by email blasting to all of our subscribers who subscribed. The lady said nothing to the effect.
After they shut us off. They said this was "adult related" we have banned your account. So they shut us off for both reasons.

I highly do not suggest ConstantContact for adult email marketing means.

We have most recently used Jangomail.com. They are small, but very, very responsive and helpful, extremely sophisticated (you can directly interface with your MySQL database and it will pull the addresses live at the time of the mailing, as well as update the list with bounces, remove requests, etc... as well as keeping a master list on their own servers.) They also offer free detailed spam analysis of your mailing (as to whether it will be identified as spam) and they will show you a rendering of your email in Google and Yahoo and a couple other popular web mailers, so you can make sure there aren't any weird rendering problems. And their deliverability seems to be excellent. I highly recommend them. They're also less expensive than Campaigner.

We tried using Campaigner for a couple months, but they were total nazis about the spam rate, even when we explained we were running one-time cleanings of old opt-in lists we hadn't mailed to in a while, and, quite frankly, we had a ton of billing problems and found their staff to be really arrogant.

But... you may also want to look at phplist, which is a free, open source mailer application. It handles bounces and unsubscribes (as well as subscribes) automatically, has very flexible list handling, sorting, and editing, and supports multiple lists and ability to mail to any or all lists, etc. Just make sure your ISP is aware of what you're doing so you have a good rapport with them in case you get a bunch of dumbassed AOL users marking the messages as spam.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gaybucks_chip

We tried using Campaigner for a couple months, but they were total nazis about the spam rate, even when we explained we were running one-time cleanings of old opt-in lists we hadn't mailed to in a while, and, quite frankly, we had a ton of billing problems and found their staff to be really arrogant.

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Yes this has been a problem in the past for us as well. however, when we do a clean up on a list, i contact my rep and let them send it so our data is not locked up. This also changes the spam rate for that account you are using. I have been extremely happy with the return on their service. my major bitch is that they are in canada and on the east coast, and up until recently their customer service hours were like 10a to 5p est. But now much better.

Have a look over on hotscripts.com they have a lot of email programs you might want to try :)

You should take a look at EmailLabs and Lyris (same company, different solutions that are scalable to different sized lists).

I usually implement one of these solutions at any company I am working with. They are reputable, willing to work with adult and hardcore and they will work with you to get a clean list.

Although, like many other companies, their spam tolerance is 1 in 1000, they are very tolerant of new lists and new companies who keep open lines of communication.

Email Labs is the more enterprise and customizable solution. Lyris has newsletter style marketing options that are very inexpensive to operate and very easy to use.

Mary