It's so hard to tell who really is "CANSPAM" compliant. All these guys say that they have high deliverablilty rates, but does that include the junk mail folders or only inbox? We would like to determine the number of subscribers who have opened the mail and what they did once they saw it (eg. clicked on a link, forwarded to a friend, deleted, unsubscribed...) at least in the near future. Seems like most hosted plans don't give you that much flexibility. You're either standard or gold. So what about something out there that allows you to use the option of tracking or not depending on the campaign???
I've been using Emaillabs for about three years and I couldn't be happier. Excellent delivery rates!!!! Also, I've heard squirrelmail and Yesmail are pretty good.
contant contact is the worst ... the delivery rate is horrible. Run away as fast as you can. You will lose good addresses from incorrectly identified hard bounces. We recently took over an 80,000 subscriber list that saw 12,000 emails get scrubbed by constant contact. We only see about 500-1000 bounces now. They are always black holed and always delivered to the spam folder. Intellicontact is a bad one too. The problem is that they just cram users onto servers with no oversight.
I use www.emailbrain.com so far I am happy with the service. Hope this helps someone. I also use phplists on my server.
Stop paying monthly fees and start using: http://www.octeth.com/ Sweet system, setup to start your own constantcontact type system, but I just use it for personal lists... live tracking, delayed tracking, and more. Just check it out for yourself Thanks, Shane
Email marketing in general drives enormous ROI if done properly It can be great for building relationships and brand recognition with your subscribers That said, make sure you follow best practices. I recommend signing up for the ClickZ email marketing newsletter, it's great. Constant Contact is ok for a starter budget, when it becomes profitable for you I'd recommend SilverPop or something similar
I've been using Constant Contact for about a year now.. We use it to send out monthly newsletters and last-minute blasts. I've been very happy with it, but I hate the pre-made templates that come with it. Has anyone found any other templates available for it? My only other option is hiring someone to create a custom template for me..
I used them for a while and really loved them. But there's a conflict between them and GoDaddy. At the time, I used Godaddy for hosting, and I had a set of freelance writers working for me, who all had email accounts hosted by them on the domain. I can understand if they didn't want to whitelist CC for everyone, but I strongly believe when running a business, I should be able to decide who I and anyone working for me can accept email from; not Godaddy. After fighting with them and talking to multiple people on the phone, someone from GD actually came out and said they wouldn't whitelist them because of some new service one of them was launching and it being competition with each other. At that moment, I left GD, moved to HostGator, and have been happy since. I would have stuck with CC in the process, but my list wasn't big enough to worry about for a while, so I stopped the newsletter to focus on other things. I've got several sites I plan to start one for now though, so I'm looking into using them again. I don't remember being anything but satisfied with them. Jenn