Hi there, I've been thinking of purchasing a newsletter tool so I can send out weekly mails to the users of my board. I've been playing around on the demo of sendstudio, and I must say I'm impressed. I only have two questions: 1. Is there a big chance of the news letters I send out being taken as spam by the various filter out there? 2. Would it be hard to import users mails from vbulletion (would I have to make custom script)?
Hi, I have been using Send Studio for about 2 months. I'm glad I found it and I do like it. I had a previous list of subscribers that I didn't want to force to re-opt-in to a new list just because I switched email software vendors. I tried both Aweber and Get Response prior to using SendStudio and I feel that the learning curve for it is no higher than AW and GR and it may be less. Plus with users like Dell, Shell, Schwab, etc., it's probably a really good program. I really like it so far and have a lot more to learn about it. As far as your two questions, the best place to get an answer I think is direct from Send Studio. I know the popular hosted autoresponder solutions really push the idea that they do a better job of delivery. I'm not convinced of that. But you can still take precautions. Notify the users of your board about your intent to send out a newsletter and ask them to whitelist your information. There are instructions available on how to do that for Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. that you can send or make available to your users. Another thing you can do is to get a dedicated IP address. Other tips: Contact your web host provider and request that a Reverse DNS be set up properly for your domain - Set up an SPF record. These and other tips are in a free report by Michael Price called "5 Secrets to Superb Email Delivery Rates". I picked up through another very popular IM forum. I am a new user here so I don't know if I can mention that forum name or not - sorry. I don't know the answer to your vBulletin question. Since that is one of the best and most popular forum software programs, I would think it's possible. Probably best to contact the vBulletin people. Craig Jones
i have the personal experience with this software. for the first question, yes it might be taken as spam and it might forward your email to junk for the second question, yes you can import the list of email from VBulletin but what you have to do is, go to MySql PHPAdmin then export the User table and save as .sql. finally open your yourfilename.sql table with Microsoft Excel. it will give some popup dialog box and ask you to select things like separate, etc... do that and click ok and ok. the database of yourfilename.sql will transfer all user data to Excel in every different column so you able to copy just the email and past in notepad to use in sendstudio. finally go to the sendstudio and import the file. notepad text file. all done. if you have any problem just send me the user.sql and i convert for you.
I've used Sendstudio for the past 18 months on my site. Now that I have over 5,000 users my server is telling me that I'm not allowed to send out any more emails. On top of that, I've not gotten through to a Yahoo user in over 6 months. Everytime I send out the list every Yahoo user bounces back. (It's about 1,000 people right now). Up to this point, I thought SendStudio was pretty good. Now I've simply gotten too big. Sendstudio is now useless to me. While this is the "very manual" way of doing it, Sendstudio has a built in feature to import from a database. This is how I imported my new vBulletin members. Brandon