Your favorite email newsletter tool?

Hi g,

I use Mail Chimp for both myself and my clients. It's super user-friendly and includes all kinds of nifty tracking and reporting features. There is also a no monthly fee option that allows you to simply purchase credits. I was able to send messages to about 200 people for $7.

Also, you can use your own design, and during set up, you can insert the unsubscribe codes and extra technical stuff.

Good luck!

Bri

Hi there,

I'm one of Bri's clients and she uses Mailchimp for me. Bri, can you look at my account, I think I'm on the wrong type of system. I opted for a monthly 200-500 for $15. Can you check on this for us? I like your plan much better. Thanks for the education on this.

Laura

I'm familiar with four email tools, listed at: http://www.blockbeta.com/email-tools/

I currently use Constant Contact. It's relatively inexpensive, and once you get used to the HTML tool for creating emails, it works pretty well. A client of mine has used Mail Chimp and been happy with it. Emma is a local company, and they'll customize a newsletter for you for about $200. Vertical Response will create and send coordinated postcards to go along with your email.

Here's a little more shameless self-promo. I'm teaching an email course at Seattle SCORE (seattlescore.org) called "All About Email" on 9/26/08. If you can't wait that long, let me know, and I'll schedule a class through BizNik.

--Robbin

I've used both Constant Contact and MailBuild. Mailbuild is super-easy to use, but I've found the statistics are sometimes slow (days to find out open/click-through data). Constant Contact has never had that problem for me, so I will probably stick with that. CC is a monthly rate of $15 plus $5 for extra image storage (optional) for emailing unlimited times up to 500 people. Mailbuild is $5 per email send plus $0.01 per recipient, so it might be a better option for someone who does infrequent campaigns and doesn't need timely reporting.

I have used godaddy's marketing email, which is also inexpensive and easy to use. I just started using gibline which I find even better than godaddy. You can access gibline through my profile if you would like to know more.

Hi there,

I toyed with about 8 different tools last summer/fall to decide what to use. I ended up deciding to go with iContact because of the features and the pricing model they offered to indies like me through there agency program. Truth is, the agency pricing is fairly similar to the Mailchimp pricing (or at least it was when I signed up).

We can talk more about this when we (finally) get together in person. In the end, I think it really helps to be clear about what features matter most to you and your business.

If you are looking for a hosted service than Mail Chimp is pretty good. I myself prefer one that I have a bit more control over by hosting it on my own web server. For that I recommend Dada Mail (http://mojo.skazat.com/). They have a free and a paid version. It is open source and constantly updated with newer and better features. It is also completely CAN-SPAM compliant.

In the long run, a lot less of an investment over hosted services.

Hi Giannina, I've tried several over the course of the past year.

Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and most recently Aweber.

It really depends on what you're looking for. Vertical Response was nice because it integrated with my Salesforce.com account. It had 'ok' formatting & design capabilities and list management, but it wasn't great for tracking where my leads came from.

Constant Contact had very nice design templates you could choose from and I felt it had the best tracking tools. It was the only one I found that really brought good visibility to who was clicking what. But again fell short when it came to capturing leads and tracking leads.

For me, my goal is building my list -- and for that Aweber has been the best tool for me. It's tracking of clickthoughs aren't as good as Constant Contact. BUT - it provides some very cool code for hover ads, web forms & integration into your site. This allows you to really tweak out your offers to see which ones pull the most leads. It also has a nice RSS feed tool which pulls content from my site....so each week i just modify the email a little bit before sending it out.

Kind of rambly -- but i hope that helps.