
Things Your Startup Should Know about Email Marketing Companies - g0atbutt
http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/07/10-things-your-startup-should-know-about-email-marketing-companies/
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MicahWedemeyer
Happy user of mailchimp here...

I think his points are very valid, and I appreciate his "mailchimp might be
perfect for you" comment. As someone who went from doing it in-house to
Mailchimp, I'll offer some advice:

Try an email marketer first, and only bring it in-house if you find that the
marketer can't do what you want or is too restrictive.

There are an infinite number of things to spend your time on, and sending
emails (and having them look good, arrive, get stats, etc) is a huuuuge time
sink. If mass emails are not the core of your business then you should be
outsourcing it. Build your core, buy the rest.

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bigiain
I'd like to mention Campaign Monitor, a local to me (Sydney.AU) startup in
this area. They've addressed at least a few of those issues. items 1, 2, 4,
and 5 are not problems with them, and 6 and 8 probably aren't a problem either
if you don't consider connecting via their API "hard".

(No affiliation apart from being a very satisfied customer/user)

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JonLim
Awesome watch.

I am the Product Manager of PostageApp (<http://www.postageapp.com>) and we're
under heavy development still, but it's always good to hear the problems that
heavy users are running into with email solutions / marketing companies.

Definitely going to write them down and see how we can make sure we solve some
of those problems.

Thanks Noah!

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brianbreslin
You guys aware of <http://postmarkapp.com>? You guys might have problems with
naming issues or trademarks. Nice design though

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JonLim
Very aware! I believe our products are around the same age, and we happened to
go one direction and they went another, however our paths are getting ready to
converge (As we will be creating a similar offering.)

Not sure on the naming issues or trademarks, but it's definitely one of my
concerns. Thanks for the refresher, I should look into it.

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mgkimsal
Using critsend here - precisely because I wanted the control I can only get
with doing it inhouse. The 'value' that companies like icontact, mailchimp,
etc. just isn't something that speaks to the needs of IT geeks. For certain
people, it's obviously fine - possibly necessary - but far too limiting for
developer/geeks.

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noahkagan
Why did you choose critsend?

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mgkimsal
Initially pricing, and the 'only pay a little up front' aspect - no monthly
contracts. I just charge up the account now and then. It used to be $1/1000 -
dropped in Jan to half that (yay).

The setup wasn't too hard, and ntoper and a couple others were in IRC to ask
questions of (and they provided some more support via email as well). I was a
transition customer - started about a year ago when they were putting the
polishing touches on their public offering. What I had was rather beta - no
self-serve payments, reporting didn't work too well - but it's improved a lot
in the last year (and even a year ago it worked for what I needed).

edit: the support was primarily me setting up domain keys and such on my end
with DNS entries - the instructions weren't as clear to a non-sysadmin mortal
such as myself a year ago.

So, pricing, pay as you go, IRC support and friendly people. Does that help?

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noahkagan
Interesting. I've liked Sendgrid since when we've had issues of peoples email
going to spam folder they are pretty helpful in tracking down why. (mostly
saying gmail is a black whole (: )

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mgkimsal
I hadn't learned of sendgrid prior to going with critsend. That said, critsend
has been fine with supporting my few issues, and until they let me down I'll
keep trusting them :)

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juddlyon
Mailchimp & Campaign Monitor are the class of the bunch, you can't go wrong
with either one. Easy templating, nice stats, A/B testing, autoresponders,
API, good customer service.

iContact and Vertical Response are my next two favs, especially the latter if
you send direct mail.

I've never used the enterprise solutions, but when I was researching for a
client I was gravitating towards ExactTarget. You can do some pretty
sophisticated rules for who gets sent what and when based on their behavior.

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eli
I can't watch the video right now, but is he talking about a specific
provider? Those are definitely things to watch out for, but not all providers
have those problems.

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noahkagan
Most comments were about Aweber and Mailchimp.

I really like Mailchimp so I don't want the video to be taken the wrong way
but a few of our challenges were with them.

Aweber (who we used first) on the other hand got hacked (twice!) and did not
bother to mention that publicly. They did the first time,
[http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/12/22/aweber-
makes-a...](http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/12/22/aweber-makes-a-
statement-about-their-data-being-compromised/)

We've moved to Sendgrid.

~~~
eli
Thanks. Sendgrid looks pretty good.

We do pretty high-volume newsletters and are using Silverpop now and
Lyris/EmailLabs before that. Silverpop is OK (the frontend UI is kinda crappy,
the API is functional but ugly, and the backend is PowerMTA which is pretty
solid). They don't require double opt-in and give you control over the
unsubscribe process if you want it. Once you start sending millions of
messages a month, the pricing on MailChimp or Constant Contact (or SendGrid
for that matter) doesn't really scale.

Silverpop was also recently hacked. I imagine email service providers make for
easy targets. Email addresses are easy to sell, but aren't typically protected
as well as obviously valuable information like credit card numbers.

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khangtoh
Every unsubscribe page should be like this
<http://www.groupon.com/austin/unsubscribe>

