I would like to enrich my business by using mailing strategies. My goals are to communicate with a community, sell products, generate traffic... and I need to send about a thousand e-mails a month to start with (should grow by 10% monthly) but I don't know what service to buy. I used to use phplists by I could never send more than 20 ou 30 email in arrow probably because of some server restrictions. Question 1: - are there hosts that limit email sending via php fonctions and are there any that let you send unlimited email? Question 2: - is it better to use a paid newsletter management service? and which one do you recommand for a reasonable budget? Question 3: - are there any other criteria (traps) I should look at before going into the mailing stuff (hidden charges...)? Question 4: - what are the differences between services offering "newsletters" and those offering "autoresponders"? can't I have them both? do I need them both? what are other types? To summerize my problem, I see clearely how to use maillings from a strategic marketing point of view but have no clue where to start from on the practical side of it.
Standard web hosting companies all tend to have restrictions on mail. The basic reason is because no matter how clean your list is and no matter whether you run completely branded emails that people opted into, there will be complaints and those complaints have very real consequences for that ISP or hosting company, particularly when you're on a shared platform (imagine all the other users affected). So, generally speaking, it's not a great idea to try to bulk mail from these hosts. Additionally, their servers are not set up for bulk mailing normally and are subsequently never whitelisted nor are any other mailing factors taken into account (such as certifications with bonded sender and the like), so your bulk mailing will result in you being funneled into bulk and spam folders as often as not. Yes, go ahead and start now. If you want to get all your subscriber info back out of an ESP and mail internally it's much easier than trying to stuff it all into an ESP later. I say this as someone who consults on internal email marketing platforms for online marketing companies. The simple fact is that at the small and medium sized level, as long as you're playing within some pretty broad rules, the ESP route is the way to go. I generally recommend GetResponse, aweber or 1ShoppingCart because they all have good deliverability and an extensive featureset with things like autoresponders. Constant Contact and MailChimp aren't bad in general, but lack some of the functionality of the larger players I've listed. If I had to choose, I'd probably choose 1ShoppingCart or GetResponse over aweber, which has a few more issues. On the ESP side? No. If you do it yourself? Only if you exceed your bandwidth alotment or puchase a decent mid-range mailing app, like SendStudio or oempro, which will run a couple hundred bucks. Always go for one with autoresponders like the three I listed above. Auto responders provide a valuable opportunity to market to your list. I give a good example in this somewhat verbose blog entry, Behavioral Targeting For The Hoi Polloi Using PPC, Web & Email, of why they're valuable and how they can be used intelligently. I hope that answers some of your questions!
OK got this one 100% This one is also convincing. What about my forum members that are registered and whose emails are stored in my database? should I move them to the ESP periodically or is there a way to automate the process? The two following responses are also cristal clear. I would finally thank you for the time you took to answer my questions. Reputation given (of course!)
Glad I could help! Let me line item again: If you're running a legit, branded site then you probably won't have any problems importing a list. Your only problem is going to be that, depending on your ESP, they may want a reconfirmation from each person as part of the import. If it were me, I'd look heavily into which of the three I mentioned is most likely to allow a bulk upload without a re-optin. I'd also get them on the phone and talk to them about this before agreeing to a contract and browbeat them a little if you have to. 1SC is likely to be the most lenient in my opinion, but that's just a spot guess. Recognize that you're doing nothing wrong, by the way, in simply moving your already opted in subscribers into a separate mailing app. The re-opt in is a condition imposed sometimes by ESPs as a function of your relationship to the ESP and having nothing to do with the customer's relationship to you, but your relationship with the users hasn't functionally changed, so don't listen to anti-email marketing theologues and their silly opinions on the topic. There are other functional problems with how to handle all this and I can talk in detail about those as well. Integrating registrations is one, integrating email changes is another. You can always IM me if it gets too thick. I just got done working on a (really stupid) double ESP integration (within the rules and without batching) for a client site that hopscotches from one ESP to the next before returning to the client site. I can't begin to tell you how idiotic this is, but the business rules I inherited were theirs, not mine, and no one wanted to gamble and skirt the process by using a transparent javascript submission. Incidentally, transparent submission should not be prohibited by the stupid ESPs until they can get their error handling in better shape. Right now some of them make it pretty difficult to seamlessly integrate their registration transparently, particularly aweber whose "web form" system is really quite poorly architected compared to 1SC and GetResponse. This, incidentally, is why I mostly deal with internal mailing systems. Having to worry about all these crazy ESP business constraints that have nothing to do with your actual customer base is a gigantic pain in the butt on top of the already gigantic pain in the butt of online marketing in general.
I see, it would really be annoying to have my members re opt in because the forum is for computer noobs and that may confuse them! Moreover, I have no more than 120 members so I don't think they would have any problem with that. I will email them before buying any service. Anyway, thank you very much for your expert input and don't hesitate to PM me if I can help. I am confortable with SEO, adsense implementation/optimisation...and related stuff (probably should put some ad units on your blog). Added you to buddy list.
Thanks and good luck! I actually consult on monetization too, but I have about five visitors on my week old blog and I'm busy with real work, so I'm just starting to pepper in the affiliate links and stuff. Nice show of competence on my part, though, to talk about monetization and do none on the actual blog lol. SEO is my glaring weak point in OM, though I know the basic conepts. Anyway, we'll see how it goes!