Email Marketing

looking into it...

[newnewbie1]

Hi! I am looking into getting into email marketing. Has anybody had any experience with a company called Constant Contact?

I have heard good things and it's relatively inexpensive. Are their any other companies that you would recommend for this service?

THANKS!

[Macguru]

Hi newnewbie1,

Minus the templates, you can find plenty of free perl scripts that will do exactly the same.

[newnewbie1]

Hey there, McGuru!

Yes, I've seen some cgi/perl and asp packages that do pretty good. I want to be able to track the views & click-thrus, ect.,so we can see what the people on the list looked at after we send the email message.

[aspdaddy]

If you want to target a specific demographic, quickly & professionally it might be easier (though not cheaper!) to outsource it, there are companies like iflow, xpedite etc that offer lots of options for tracking and campaign management.

If you do it yourself, you can track the views and clik-thrus in your log files by using tracking images and querystrings.

[elgumbo]

Hi

I set up a trial with constant contact but I didn't like the way it included their address at the bottom of every email. I know the service is cheap but I don't want my customers to know that I am using a cheap service ;)

Also, and maybe this is just me being a little too paranoid, I didn't like the idea of giving all my customer contacts to another company.

As Macguru said, you should be able to find a free script that will do almost all you can do with CC.

Feel free to PM me if you would to know which one I now use.

[Condor12]

Hi newnewbie1,

"I've seen some cgi/perl and asp packages"

Anyone got names/places of these asp packages?

[MrSpeed]

newnewbie1-
Do you already have an e-mail list or are you looking to buy/rent one?
I have a mailing list of about 8000 members and my perl script/server chokes on it. I think it's worthile to do this with a company that specializes in sending out emails.

[hannamyluv]

I sent a sticky to newnewbie1 about this but I'll put it here too. I would reccomend using an outside company for the main reason that you do not want to send emails from your own IP addresses. AOL 8 and MSN 8 now have a little feature that allows you to report "spam" with a click of a button. If enough people click on this button, any emails to anyone using AOL or MSN (or hotmail) from your IP address are blocked. You are black listed. These addresses alone probably make up 30% - 40% of your list (on average).

They don't check to see if you are sending legitimate opt-in emails. The concensus is that many AOL and MSN users will come to use this feature as an opt-out method because they don't really know the difference between spam and legit email they don't want to get anymore.

Good luck getting a hold of anyone at MSN to get on a white list and if you get a hold of anyone at AOL, you're next to god. AOL and MSN are not the only companies that have this policy, they are just the first to make it easiest. An outside service has dedicated people who work with these companies to keep their IP addresses off black lists. They have a large enough pull so AOL and MSN will talk to them. You probably don't.

Free scripts are cheaper, but not nearly as robust and they will choke on the larger lists. And for the potential loss of being able to send to 30-40% of your list, the savings just aren't worth it.

As for whether people will know you are using a cheap service, I don't know who you are sending to but I'm pretty sure most of the people on my lists think we send them out one at a time (we even get long rambeling emails back about what they are doing in their lives) and think that the email they get from us is just as free to send as the email they send to their friends. I doubt they care one whit what the bottom says, unless you are sending to some hi-tech lists. And if that's the case, they know the costs and would probably understand why you are using a decent but cheap service.