Search For Email Mailing List Solution

January 26, 2007

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I have spent several hours last night and this morning investigating email list services. Since one of the founding philosophies of this site is that you can learn by what I am doing, I thought I would post where this search stands. My situation is this: I have a large mailing list over on PCMech. The tip of the day is around 31,000 subscribers and the newsletter is higher than that. And, of course, I have the newsletter here at WebbyOnline. These email lists have been managed in house. I want to move away from the in-house system to a more dependable system. Either a third-party software solution to run locally on my server, or a hosted solution. I have not made up my mind on what to do yet, however here’s where I’m at.

The major software solution I am looking at is 1-2-All, from Active Campaign. They have been advertising in the Sitepoint forums for a little while now and they offer a free trial, so I checked it out. Good, solid software. I have not yet tried it in a production setting (sending any emails), but it looks to be pretty robust. It also has autoresponder capability, which is something I am looking for. The base license install is $189, and they offer some valuable add-ons for additional coin.

There are a lot of hosted solutions out there. I am looking at two types: (1) your standard email list service, and (2) the RSS feed-to-email services. I have two weekly newsletters (currently) and am seriously considering siwtching our Tip of the Day over to a blog format. So, the RSS-to-email services would be a great way to switch to a blog while still offering the daily tip in the email inbox. The hosted solutions I looked at so far are:

Aweber - Comes in highly recommended. They offer auto-responder service and solid delivery rate. They do not offer a free trial, so I had to actually charge my card to get an account for trial purposes (however, they offer a no-hassle refund within 30 days). The interface is not very polished and is a little hard to figure out for me, but I can tell this is a solid service. It’s also very affordable. The real kick in the groin here, though, is that they are very limiting when it comes to importing an existing list. They limit the import to 2,000 addresses per day. After 5 days, if the imports go well, they will allow you to import the rest without restriction. However, during those imports, if they find a bunch of undeliverables, they will reject the whole list. Additionally, they will send an email to every subscriber, forcing them to re-confirm in order to stay on your mailing list. So, essentially, this is like handing your whole list over to Aweber and then having them likely throw away half of it. Even if your list is pretty clean, people are people and you’re very likely to have alot of subscribers fail to re-confirm themselves for one reason or the other.
Constant Contact. Another solid service. Very nice interface, and a free 60-day trial. However, it’s coming in as pretty expensive for a list of the size I have. I am in the “call for prices” range, but judging by the published rates, it’ll probably run me $250-$300 monthly to operate this list. Considering I’m paying nothing now (its all in-house), that’s a large chunk to chew.
IntelliContact
GetResponse
Campaign Monitor - Expensive, in my view. $5 + 1 cent per subscriber. That means every tip I send would cost me over $300. I don’t think so, scooter.
NetAtlantic - Uses Lyris software. Solid service. I actually used to use these guys and, in retrospect, probably should have stayed. In looking at their rates now, they have apparently gone up for a list my size. But, they do offer an ODBC connection option in their Enterprise accounts for synching with an external database. That would make the job easier, for sure.
Vertical Response

Now, the RSS-to-email options are a LOT cheaper, many even free. Since my feeds are all managed using Feedburner, there are a few services which Feedburner offers right in their own interface.

Feedburner. That’s right, they have their own service. Unfortunately, the only way to get a list imported is to email it to them and they do it themselves. Not very helpful.
FeedBlitz - Looks to be very robust and they do offer list importing. I exchanged emails with Phil over there and they seem to be friendly and would be able to handle my tip list. They just apparently imported a list of 100K addresses for another account. They offer some paid services which I would probably use, however they are cheap compared to the options above.
Zookoda - Nice, Web 2.0-ish looking company offering a free service. Their system looks a little simplistic, but it would probably work.
Aweber - already mentioned, but they actually also offer an RSS-to-email option in their accounts.

So, I will post a followup when I finalize on this. As of now, I am leaning toward the tip blog with FeedBlitz, then perhaps either Aweber or the in-house hosted 1-2-All software for the weekly newsletters and auto-responder. Aweber is attractive, however having to re-confirm every subscriber again is a major drag I may not be able to get over.