Marketing Newslettes

[iHobb]

There are a lot of options out there for hosting of Ecommerce Newsletters. Are there any that are truly better than the rest?

Is Miva Merchant relevant to any? Assume not.

I would like to find a newsletter service (or software) that does not constitute a large amount of design work (HTML, etc).

I have a few thousand emails from customers who have requested the email, accumulated over 10 years, but never purged for dead and undeliverable addresses.

Does anyone have experience working with a program or service that can help?

Bob MacLachlan
www.ihobb.com

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Bronto is a step up when it comes to Email for Ecommerce, but it's an expensive Enterprise solution. Their average customer is spending close to $2k a month with them on email.

[William Davis]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

I urge you to try Infacta's, GroupMail. Inexpensive, one-time expense, loaded with every feature you need. They have three versions:

GroupMail Free Edition: Free
GroupMail Personal Edition: $139.95
GroupMail Business Edition: $349.95

We have been using the Personal Edition for over 10 years, Excellent!

There are however two minor issues though:

1. They are out of Ireland, so due to the difference in time-zone, may become an issue if you need technical support -which is seldom ever, but very good, and
2. Initial setup may seem overwelming to if you are just starting out in the e-commerce, but they have come along way.

[d_host]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Check out http://www.InternetMailingServices.com - it's just $25/month + the cost of sending your emails out, and unlike most other options, it completely offloads your own web server and allows it to run your web site, while the email newsletters are sent out from a bank of servers doing nothing but email. Fully customizable, has a lot of templates, and has probably some of the best tracking of every email you send out and every item your recipients click on in those emails.

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Bronto is a step up when it comes to Email for Ecommerce, but it's an expensive Enterprise solution. Their average customer is spending close to $2k a month with them on email.

I'm not sure if they gave you that number of where you got it from, but that is WAY higher than we are paying. If the average customer is paying that much on Bronto, we negotiated like a champ!

We just started with Bronto last month and I can already say it is a hundred times better than the in-house method we had been using for the previous 5 years. The reporting available with Bronto is just amazing, and once we have time to grasp some of their other features like integrated A/B testing and "Remails", I think we'll be able to improve our ROI by leaps and bounds.

I looked at a number of other services including (but not limited to and in no particular order):
Vertical Response
Campaign Monitor
Mail Chimp
iContact Plus
Constant Contact
Extact Target

And based on our needs, I felt Bronto was the best option. Honestly, though, if you are looking for a ESP, you need to just start calling/emailing. There were probably 10 or more platforms that I could cross off my list by just browsing their website or talking to someone for 5 minutes.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Yeah I did get those numbers from them and I'm sure their million dollar per year accounts skew the numbers. We're actively looking at Bronto for an integration and promotion to our base, but I suspect it'll really hit home with the top 10% of our customers and the rest will be looking for a more Constant Contact/MailChimp type experience.

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Mail Chimp is lightyears ahead of Constant Contact IMO. I was completely unimpressed with what Constant Contact has to offer, but Mail Chimp (despite their unprofessional/non-traditional look) is actually really, really nice.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Marketing Newslettes

Two questions:

1) Does anyone know 9or at least have a gut feeling) about whether any particular service would get through junk / spam filters more effectively?

Our own email newsletters (sent from our servers) seem to get junked by yahoo, hotmail and gmail, and that ain't good. :(

2) I use Thunderbird as an email client, and a lot of legitimate newsletters / order confirmation emails get a "thunderbird Thinks this might be a scam" warning on them.

I suspect this is because the message is sent by one server (the third-party mail server), but the links in the email are to another server (i.e., the merchant's website).

Does anybody have any insights about this?