I am going to expand on a previous post and ask if members might suggest a newsletter distribution and tracking company. I am looking at companies like myemma, mailchimp, constant contact to name a few. Our list is very small now (only a few hundred) - Any recommendations that are excellent AND cost-effective?

Doug

Hi Doug,

When you say "newsletter distribution" do you mean ezines?

I'll assume you do. I use phplist ( http://tincan.co.uk/phplist ) on my own shared hosting. What I like about it is that it's FREE! If you're OK installing scripts, and are fairly comfortable with setting up MYSQL tables (or can get your hosting people to do it for you, or Tincan or install it from Fantastico), then it's fairly straightforward. What I also like is the added control you get when you have your own application installed on your own server.

There are some downsides to it:
1) No autoresonder
2) It doesn't automatically send the emails at a set time in the future - you still have to manually kick the process off. However, you can load up an issue of your newsletter in advance so that all you have to do is go in and send it.

I tried numerous subscription service ezine broadcast services and found that most had limitations or anomalies that made me feel less than confident about using them. For example, one noted internet marketer's application didn't send some of my email for a week! Obviously this made testing very difficult, and also, I couldn't trust that my ezine was going to appear in people's inboxes at the right time. Another issue with many services was return addresses with long, convoluted numbers referring to the domain of the service, and not my domain. This means people can't hit reply to talk to you. Not only that, but if someone else on the services gets flagged by Spamcop, then your emails will probably be flagged as spam as well.

My conclusion - sacrifice some functionality (that I don't need right now anyways) for greater control. If my needs become more sophisticated, I'll probably go to Auto Response Plus ( http://www.ecom24.com/ )

Hope this helps,
Jane

I second that. PHP list is the easiest way to do it.

Jane, hi.

thank you for your thorough email and thoughts. I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer so, honestly, PHP does not appeal much to me. I am curious what ezine services you have tried and what you believe are their limitations. I can't believe that constant contact or some of the bigger names don't provide a valuable service with their thousands of subscribers - so they must be doing something right. From design to list management to tracking most of these services provide benefits although, of course, there are differences. And they seem cheap at $20-30 a month.

best,

doug

Doug,

One that I have used in the past is Constant Contact ( http://www.constantcontact.com ). Best of all you can try them out for free, and if your list is small, it costs less when you do become a paying member. They have amazing tracking capabilities.

However, that being said. After using them, I decided, why not create one myself?

So I did. I've been working on it on and off the last couple of years, and it's about ready for launch. I'm looking for some folks to help me with the beta testing (you can use as much as you want for free, even after I go live).

One minor technical problem I'm having right now is with really big lists. I put an optin list I had on there (over 17,000 email addresses) and found I had to break it into about 3000 at a time, or the pages would time out when sending.

So for the time being (until I fix that problem), you can use it for free if your list is smaller than 3000 names. It has about 90% the functionality of Constant Contact and other services (I'll be adding more, but I wanted to get the core functionality and reporting and tracking first).

In fact, I often use the built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor to write some Web pages and HTML emails over tools like Front Page, because it doesn't add all the extra useless junk that FP and others do.

If anyone is interested, send me a PM. It's fully functional now, except for the large list issue, but I just have to make a few cosmetic changes. Minor stuff.

I'll even set it up so you take a test run and see it for yourself before you decide. Just let me know.

John

Hi Doug,

I tried:

ProAutoresponder
CoolerEmail

and various others.

I encountered various "deficits" and no one program did everything I wanted it to. Some of the problems were:

Difficulty manually inputting contacts (when you want to subscribe someone on their behalf)
Difficulty accessing or viewing information on members
Not being able to save messages
Not being able to see which messages have been sent (i.e. a history)
Not being able to find out who has received what message
Not knowing whether messages have been sent as scheduled, and whether the queue failed at all
Difficulty inputting and editing messages
Message not coming from your own domain
Unable to schedule newsletters
Application is very slow
Unattractive system generated footers (i.e. stuff that you can't change or remove)
Unable to move users from one campaign/list to another (e.g. people who have bought something could be moved to a different follow up sequence)
Unable to run more than one list

Many people recommend aweber, constant contact, autocontactor and 1shopping cart.

Good luck!

Jane