

Ask HN: What does everyone use to send out newsletters, email campaigns? - ujjwalg

We have been using mailchimp for the last couple of months but our user list has been growing and we are looking to change the service or build our own. What is everyone's opinion about it or everyone use for their own startups/blogs etc.?
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apsurd
My honest advice: Think like a business. DO NOT build your own email system.
Why do that when you can use that time to evolve your app?

If you can't pay a monthly mailchimp fee with your current model, then the
model needs changing.

edit: Take heed of Patrick's "marketing evolution" strategies below and
realize there are oh-so-many more lucrative things to be working on than
coding a custom mailer.

~~~
patio11
I agree with everything you write, except with the suggestion to evolve your
app.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a much much better engineer
than I am and can duplicate MailChimp's functionality in a single work day --
8 hours. Spiffy for you! You'll save about $100 this year, or whatever, and do
a bit better running your software business than waiting tables, despite the
fact that you're a kick-booty engineer.

Instead, you could evolve your app. I don't know how much you can get done in
a day, but we've established that you're a kick butt engineer, so maybe you
get a new feature done. Yay. But most of your users won't use the feature.
Most won't even know you have it. (Instrument your new features, folks. It is
depressing but invaluable to correct your intuition that you know what your
users want. Nobody knows what users want. Users don't even know what users
want.)

Instead of spending a day on the app, you could spend a day on your email
marketing. For example, A/B testing subject lines for your lifecycle emails.
(Or, if you've read my blog recently, building systems which will let you do
that sort of thing on a recurring basis.) I am totally not an email marketing
guru (one of my skills to work on in 2010), but everything I know about split
testing tells me that if you aren't doing it yet you're missing a LOT of
opportunities to eek 5 to 10% performance gains out of it. Which, when you're
doing email at scale, means you make stupid amounts of money. And you get to
keep the improvements forever, since they'll probably never get stale, rot, or
require upkeep.

My one "Oh that just isn't even fair" suggestion with regards to life cycle
email: putting stuff in the subject line that reminds your customer they
actually have an existing relationship with you works very, very well. The
easiest possible example of this is pulling their name out of your records and
putting it there. A/B test if you don't believe me.

A more sophisticated variant is tying your email creative to your usage data.
The particulars of that will change with your commercial offering and service,
but here's an example for me: I send customers an email 24 hours after signup
which thanks them for signing up and tells them how to log back into their
account and use it. Currently, it has a static subject line which is pretty
uninspired -- something like "Here's how to print your bingo cards." One thing
I want to try is to have the computer inspect their account and craft the
subject line to appeal to their interests, such as "Susan, don't forget your
Baby Shower bingo cards" if Susan had started working on baby shower cards
yesterday but not printed them.

Intuitively, that sounds like it is a heck of a lot more compelling to me than
the old subject line. I can do an experiment like that for far, far cheaper
than adding additional features to my software, and it will probably have a
bigger impact on the bottom line.

~~~
apsurd
Right on! I was being HN-safe and giving technical advice like "code!" but
yeah more accurate to say "evolve your business" which quite nicely groups app
evolution (note evolve does not have to auto-imply feature add, when it well
could be feature-loss, streamlining, performance increase, new api, etc) and
marketing evolution as you quite nicely explain here - bookmarked!

~~~
patio11
My experience with HN is that people here are remarkably tolerant of marketing
and other engineering disciplines.

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patio11
MailChimp. Cheap, wonderfully featured API, pre-existing Ruby code that took
my integration time to within 2 hours.

If you're doing iPhone apps at the traditional iPhone price point, though, I
don't know how any service which charges for a marginal email is going to be
worthwhile for you.

~~~
apsurd
I use campaign monitor. Maybe its just a developer (rather than designer)
thing, but the super-rich design-tastic layout that is mailchimp was actually
a huge turnoff for me - I couldn't seem to just _find stuff_. I really wanted
to love mailchimp because the monthly rates make it really really cost
effective. But I ended up _having_ to go with campaign monitor even though it
is more (if you send a lot) because campaign monitor is just damned elegantly
simple. The api docs are simple, the interface is simple, the plans are
simple.

Just really could not get over that damned chimp staring at me, talking to me,
telling me what to do all the damned time, I guess. =\

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nreece
CampaignMonitor - <http://www.campaignmonitor.com> is pretty good.

~~~
nedwin
We use Campaign Monitor as well and never had a problem. They're Australian
too!

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bretpiatt
The folks behind <http://www.beanstalkapp.com> also do
<http://www.newsberry.com> \-- we've used it for a few projects and had good
success.

They start off at Free! for < 100 subs,
<http://newsberry.com/pricing/standard-plans>

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3ds
I've successfully used cleverreach, which is a german company, because a
client asked me to. It worked really well, importing addresses from CVS,
personalizing, campaign monitoring, click rates, etc:

<http://www.cleverreach.de/frontend/index.php?flang=en>

For preparation I handcoded an html-table layout with some css which I later
turned to inline css using <http://premailer.dialect.ca/> because other css
gets stripped out by gmail and other web mail clients.

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dbc
I don't have any advice for software to use, buy I do suggest you use
something other than your production DNS domain and mail server for sending
out these messages. Even if all of them opt-in, _some_ of your recipients will
mark your messages as spam and that mail server/domain will start to show up
on blacklists. If your production domain is xyzcorp.com, maybe you should
register xyzcorp-messages.com for this activity.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This sounds like really bad advice to me. If one were going to set up a
spam/phishing operation then the first thing would be to choose a domain like
xyzcorp-messages.com. I'm sure that the blacklists look at domain age and
prior performance too. Anything marked spam from a brand new domain, which
appears to be a phishing domain, that has no history of not spamming
associated with its ownership is surely going to pop into a blacklist faster.

You have some evidence experience to back up your suggestion?

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hikari17
We currently use Constant Contact for newsletters and email campaigns. It's
served us well so far, but I could be easily convinced to ditch it -- the
email templates, editing features, and analytics are decent, but hardly
inspired or delightful. I'm looking seriously at both Aweber and Emma... and
this thread has motivated me to consider MailChimp too.

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barmstrong
<http://FeedmailPro.com> is great for RSS based email campaigns.

The way I look at it, might as well make the email a blog post (for Google
juice, so future people who look for it can find it, etc) and then just use an
RSS to email service.

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skippybosco
You don't really say, what is it about your evolving business that dictates a
change in mail provider?

That being said, depending on your volume and functionality you require,
<http://www.aweber.com> is also an option to consider.

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brm
No need to build your own when things like OEMPro and Dada Mail exist

<http://octeth.com/>

<http://dadamailproject.com/>

