I've been having a struggle with newsletters, I run a med sized vBulletin site as well as a small xenforo site, it's mainly the vBulletin site that i'm focused on right now and any advice, experience etc would be hugely appreciated Have anyone ever used http://sendy.co ? It seems that you use it along with amazon ses, I've been reading some good reviews about it. The biggest thing that I struggle with is understanding how I'm supposed to extract email addresses from vBUlletin to put into the system, I want something that I can select who the email goes to etc so I'm not messing with the DB etc, but I also appreciate that the email/newsletter software needs to control bounce backs, unregistered emails etc, is this the bit that's covered by the plugins? it looks like on a rolling basis aweber is cheaper than mailchimp, could be wrong on that though, it also looks like aweber is orientated around affiliate marketing, I've no idea if that will impact it's ability to just send out newsletters with nice graphics and links in, or if I should be seriously considering affiliate marketing and use it for that.... I know there's also vertical response, getresponse, icontact etc as well, although I've not looked at them a lot. I just need to get started with it, at the moment i've got about 31,000 members that have had very little cleaning up for 11 years so that's going to actually drop significantly to get to the actual amount of valid email addresses, they're divided up into about 10 different usergroups, there's obviously the banned usergroup and we've got another one for those that have died so we need to be able to filter these out to start with and then carry on having new members added, those that move to other usergroups and some how rack those that have requested not to receive emails etc. So, i'm looking for a solution that accommodates that structure and need and will send out a monthly newsletter that's not too hard to put together. I know some of you have had loads of experience with stuff like this and I appreciate that there's going to be setup costs involved but i'd like the actual cost of sending emails to be as low as possible as the site really doesn't generate a lot of money so ongoing affordability is a big deal to me, hence me wondering about http://sendy.co and if it's a legitimate option. Any thoughts and advice hugely appreciated Thanks T
Hi Tony, I have used Sendy in the past and I have also read a lot of good reviews, it's good and cheap, the only issue is that a software on your pc/server, isn't something in cloud like mailchimp/aweber etc. In your situation I would suggest to take a look at : Sendinblue.com where with around $8/month you can send 40k emails so you are covered. Regarding email import, I would suggest to do a bit of research but as far as I know you can export all vbulleting users in csv from: Users -> Generate Email List. Please let me know if this helps and also note that I am working for Sendinblue.