Email List Management System

Selecting a vendor - what to look for

[donpps]

I need a stable, scalable email list management system.

Features I will like to see:

1. List segmentation
2. Multiple testing capability
3. Easy list management
4. Stable platform
5. Cost effective
6. Multipart email capability.
7. Possible interface with offline databases

Any ideas or recommendations?

[Mardi_Gras]

You want it all! Seriously, that is a pretty good requirement list you put together there. Getting all of that in one service may be a challenge. Remote database access is really convenient - JangoMail offers that feature - but JangoMail lacks some other useful features like easy testing. Vertical Response offers great testing but no remote database capabilities. Campaign Enterpise might be a solution - but it is high-end, so I have not bothered to test it personally.

[donpps]

Thanks Mardi Gras,

Yes, I realize that is a tall order. Your recommendations were right on the money. I checked out all of them and I have to say I am leaning towards Campaign Enterprise and Vertical Response. I will let you know what I find out.

Thanks once again.

[bakedjake]

Any ideas or recommendations?

Got good programmers, decent servers, and a decent connection to the Internet? If so, I'd roll your own.

It lets you do things, such as complete automation with your CRM software and website that you couldn't ordinarily do.

[Chico_Loco]

I agree with Jake,

I'd NEVER use a 3rd party for email services. Just today I sent an email to about 5,000 subscribers. Wrote the script for it myself, and it works perfectly.

[Mardi_Gras]

>I'd NEVER use a 3rd party for email services.

Not everyone who needs to send e-mail knows how to write code.

[Chico_Loco]

Not everyone who needs to send e-mail knows how to write code

That's no excuse, there's loads of free scripts out there that could handle pretty large lists. Most are extremely easy to set up with essentially no coding experience required. I'd even be willing to give my code for free!

[hannamyluv]

Just today I sent an email to about 5,000 subscribers. Wrote the script for it myself, and it works perfectly.

So the script works but who do you have to handle your spam complaints? (even if you run a clean list, you will have spam complaints) Ever tried to get a hold of a live person at AOL? Did you know AOL is a fourth to a third of your list? What will you do if AOL spam blocks you? How about opt-outs and bounces? Did you know that ISPs will block you if you hit them with too many bounces too many times? Not to mention that silly little clause in the CAN-SPAM act about opt-outs. Oh, oh, and what about open rate and click rate? Is anyone even reading what you send out? How do you know?

Maybe for 5,000 names you are willing to risk this stuff, but on my 100,000+ list, no way! The fees are so small now that the third party benefits greatly outweigh the cost.

[tedster]

I'm with you on this one, hannamyluv. With all the factors impacting email campaigns today, you need a dedicated in-house department to maximise the number of messages actually delivered.

For me, outsourcing is a no-brainer in this department. I've seen people almost double their campaign's effectiveness. Of course, they were only pushed into after throwing away a few days wrestling with AOL's hair trigger blacklisting.

For those who must take it in-house, there's a free app I just tested called Gammadyne. It's got major top shelf options, including outbound frequency tuning by destination domain -- so you don't hammer any one server (AOL, hotmail, whoever) too frequently. Database connectivity on your server requires their paid version, but it does the job very well.

Still, I'd bet that a solid outsourced service could improve on Gammadyne's performance. You'd be amazed at how many emails trigger false positives for spam (or even viruses!) and simply go to devnull -- you'll never see a bounce. Good third party services let you test your message against several types of spam filtering.

[Chico_Loco]

At the bottom of each email is details of the subscription (the ip from which it was submitted, along with the date and time of submission, allowing for lookings in the http logs to hunt down the users submitting it to us, this is a perfect way of proving an email address was not havested, plus if thethe user forget they signed up, they usually end up going "ok - guess so").

There is also an unsubscribe link which, when clicked, adds that email address to a blacklist so that they will NEVER be emailed again. Upon unsubscription, ip, date & time are recoreded.

My emails and now in HTML format, so request to my site logo in the email contain a string logo.gif?[e-mail] - So this allows me to track (if I wanted to) who read the HTML email (or at least fetched the image). Needless to say, people from AOL are getting the email, and at last check, about 70% of people are loading the email within 1 week of being sent, which I'm happy with :)

Of course, my emails are NOT spam, and are completely targetted. I refrain from even mentioning anything that's not on-topic, just to reduces the chances of a spam complaint (I've had them before when I had a much larger list, nearly as big as your 100,000 list).

[steveallbrands]

I manage my customer/email list in PHP/MySQL. It is easy to write a script to send emails to everyone, but as the list grows, any web host will become very unhappy if you send out 50,000+ emails. And, if anyone complains, you could have your account revoked.

SO... does anyone else use a web-based e-mail service in a situation like mine? I'd like to handle the list and unsubscribes myself. When I want to send a message to my list, I would simply export my list to a file and upload it to the service.

Any recommendations for a service? Am I going about this all wrong?

[Chico_Loco]

Jast as a note, In many cases, ISP's don't differentiate between the domain an email was sent from and the one promoted in the email itself. So, If I were to send a 100,000+ email tomorrow and 15 people complain that it's spam to my ISP ,then they can just go ahead an cancel my account just because my domain name would have been promoted in the email, even if I used a 3rd party service to send that email. And don't think people don't complain to the site being promoted too..

Not sure about the names of services, admittedly I've never looked it up, and I don't know how much it costs but I'd love to know! Anyone? I heard 1 person mention "RafaSoft"?

[webstudio]

hi there,

send me a sticky email and i can recommend a web site that will help you with list management and remote access to the entire systemns, its relativelly cheap too

Andreas