Ask HN: What does everyone use to send out newsletters, email campaigns? • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by patio11 » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 6:51 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #10

patio11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-boo…

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!

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

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

#12

Post by skippybosco » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 7:27 AM UTC

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.

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

#13

Post by barmstrong » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 9:00 AM UTC

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.

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

#14

Post by dbc » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 10:08 AM UTC

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.

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

#15

Post by hikari17 » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 1:52 PM UTC

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.

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

#16

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 2:21 PM UTC

dbc wrote: post #14

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 activit…

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?

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

#17

Post by brm » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 2:26 PM UTC

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

http://octeth.com/

http://dadamailproject.com/

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

#18

Post by 3ds » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 3:11 PM UTC

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.