Ask HN: What does everyone use to send out newsletters, email campaigns?
We have been using mailchimp for the last couple of months but our user list has been growing and we are looking to change the service or build our own. What is everyone's opinion about it or everyone use for their own startups/blogs etc.?
10 comments
My honest advice: Think like a business.
DO NOT build your own email system. Why do that when you can use that time to evolve your app?
If you can't pay a monthly mailchimp fee with your current model, then the model needs changing.
edit: Take heed of Patrick's "marketing evolution" strategies below and realize there are oh-so-many more lucrative things to be working on than coding a custom mailer.
If you can't pay a monthly mailchimp fee with your current model, then the model needs changing.
edit: Take heed of Patrick's "marketing evolution" strategies below and realize there are oh-so-many more lucrative things to be working on than coding a custom mailer.
I agree with everything you write, except with the suggestion to evolve your app.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a much much better engineer than I am and can duplicate MailChimp's functionality in a single work day -- 8 hours. Spiffy for you! You'll save about $100 this year, or whatever, and do a bit better running your software business than waiting tables, despite the fact that you're a kick-booty engineer.
Instead, you could evolve your app. I don't know how much you can get done in a day, but we've established that you're a kick butt engineer, so maybe you get a new feature done. Yay. But most of your users won't use the feature. Most won't even know you have it. (Instrument your new features, folks. It is depressing but invaluable to correct your intuition that you know what your users want. Nobody knows what users want. Users don't even know what users want.)
Instead of spending a day on the app, you could spend a day on your email marketing. For example, A/B testing subject lines for your lifecycle emails. (Or, if you've read my blog recently, building systems which will let you do that sort of thing on a recurring basis.) I am totally not an email marketing guru (one of my skills to work on in 2010), but everything I know about split testing tells me that if you aren't doing it yet you're missing a LOT of opportunities to eek 5 to 10% performance gains out of it. Which, when you're doing email at scale, means you make stupid amounts of money. And you get to keep the improvements forever, since they'll probably never get stale, rot, or require upkeep.
My one "Oh that just isn't even fair" suggestion with regards to life cycle email: putting stuff in the subject line that reminds your customer they actually have an existing relationship with you works very, very well. The easiest possible example of this is pulling their name out of your records and putting it there. A/B test if you don't believe me.
A more sophisticated variant is tying your email creative to your usage data. The particulars of that will change with your commercial offering and service, but here's an example for me: I send customers an email 24 hours after signup which thanks them for signing up and tells them how to log back into their account and use it. Currently, it has a static subject line which is pretty uninspired -- something like "Here's how to print your bingo cards." One thing I want to try is to have the computer inspect their account and craft the subject line to appeal to their interests, such as "Susan, don't forget your Baby Shower bingo cards" if Susan had started working on baby shower cards yesterday but not printed them.
Intuitively, that sounds like it is a heck of a lot more compelling to me than the old subject line. I can do an experiment like that for far, far cheaper than adding additional features to my software, and it will probably have a bigger impact on the bottom line.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a much much better engineer than I am and can duplicate MailChimp's functionality in a single work day -- 8 hours. Spiffy for you! You'll save about $100 this year, or whatever, and do a bit better running your software business than waiting tables, despite the fact that you're a kick-booty engineer.
Instead, you could evolve your app. I don't know how much you can get done in a day, but we've established that you're a kick butt engineer, so maybe you get a new feature done. Yay. But most of your users won't use the feature. Most won't even know you have it. (Instrument your new features, folks. It is depressing but invaluable to correct your intuition that you know what your users want. Nobody knows what users want. Users don't even know what users want.)
Instead of spending a day on the app, you could spend a day on your email marketing. For example, A/B testing subject lines for your lifecycle emails. (Or, if you've read my blog recently, building systems which will let you do that sort of thing on a recurring basis.) I am totally not an email marketing guru (one of my skills to work on in 2010), but everything I know about split testing tells me that if you aren't doing it yet you're missing a LOT of opportunities to eek 5 to 10% performance gains out of it. Which, when you're doing email at scale, means you make stupid amounts of money. And you get to keep the improvements forever, since they'll probably never get stale, rot, or require upkeep.
My one "Oh that just isn't even fair" suggestion with regards to life cycle email: putting stuff in the subject line that reminds your customer they actually have an existing relationship with you works very, very well. The easiest possible example of this is pulling their name out of your records and putting it there. A/B test if you don't believe me.
A more sophisticated variant is tying your email creative to your usage data. The particulars of that will change with your commercial offering and service, but here's an example for me: I send customers an email 24 hours after signup which thanks them for signing up and tells them how to log back into their account and use it. Currently, it has a static subject line which is pretty uninspired -- something like "Here's how to print your bingo cards." One thing I want to try is to have the computer inspect their account and craft the subject line to appeal to their interests, such as "Susan, don't forget your Baby Shower bingo cards" if Susan had started working on baby shower cards yesterday but not printed them.
Intuitively, that sounds like it is a heck of a lot more compelling to me than the old subject line. I can do an experiment like that for far, far cheaper than adding additional features to my software, and it will probably have a bigger impact on the bottom line.
Right on! I was being HN-safe and giving technical advice like "code!" but yeah more accurate to say "evolve your business" which quite nicely groups app evolution (note evolve does not have to auto-imply feature add, when it well could be feature-loss, streamlining, performance increase, new api, etc) and marketing evolution as you quite nicely explain here - bookmarked!
My experience with HN is that people here are remarkably tolerant of marketing and other engineering disciplines.
MailChimp. Cheap, wonderfully featured API, pre-existing Ruby code that took my integration time to within 2 hours.
If you're doing iPhone apps at the traditional iPhone price point, though, I don't know how any service which charges for a marginal email is going to be worthwhile for you.
If you're doing iPhone apps at the traditional iPhone price point, though, I don't know how any service which charges for a marginal email is going to be worthwhile for you.
I use campaign monitor. Maybe its just a developer (rather than designer) thing, but the super-rich design-tastic layout that is mailchimp was actually a huge turnoff for me - I couldn't seem to just find stuff. I really wanted to love mailchimp because the monthly rates make it really really cost effective. But I ended up having to go with campaign monitor even though it is more (if you send a lot) because campaign monitor is just damned elegantly simple. The api docs are simple, the interface is simple, the plans are simple.
Just really could not get over that damned chimp staring at me, talking to me, telling me what to do all the damned time, I guess. =\
Just really could not get over that damned chimp staring at me, talking to me, telling me what to do all the damned time, I guess. =\
Seconded, MailChimp is mindblowingly awesome. Their feature set is wild and they present everything in a very easy to use way. Their new free plan makes it worth a try too.
CampaignMonitor - http://www.campaignmonitor.com is pretty good.
We use Campaign Monitor as well and never had a problem. They're Australian too!
The folks behind http://www.beanstalkapp.com also do http://www.newsberry.com -- we've used it for a few projects and had good success.
They start off at Free! for < 100 subs, http://newsberry.com/pricing/standard-plans
They start off at Free! for < 100 subs, http://newsberry.com/pricing/standard-plans
I've successfully used cleverreach, which is a german company, because a client asked me to. It worked really well, importing addresses from CVS, personalizing, campaign monitoring, click rates, etc:
http://www.cleverreach.de/frontend/index.php?flang=en
For preparation I handcoded an html-table layout with some css which I later turned to inline css using http://premailer.dialect.ca/ because other css gets stripped out by gmail and other web mail clients.
http://www.cleverreach.de/frontend/index.php?flang=en
For preparation I handcoded an html-table layout with some css which I later turned to inline css using http://premailer.dialect.ca/ because other css gets stripped out by gmail and other web mail clients.
I don't have any advice for software to use, buy I do suggest you use something other than your production DNS domain and mail server for sending out these messages. Even if all of them opt-in, some of your recipients will mark your messages as spam and that mail server/domain will start to show up on blacklists. If your production domain is xyzcorp.com, maybe you should register xyzcorp-messages.com for this activity.
This sounds like really bad advice to me. If one were going to set up a spam/phishing operation then the first thing would be to choose a domain like xyzcorp-messages.com. I'm sure that the blacklists look at domain age and prior performance too. Anything marked spam from a brand new domain, which appears to be a phishing domain, that has no history of not spamming associated with its ownership is surely going to pop into a blacklist faster.
You have some evidence experience to back up your suggestion?
You have some evidence experience to back up your suggestion?
We currently use Constant Contact for newsletters and email campaigns. It's served us well so far, but I could be easily convinced to ditch it -- the email templates, editing features, and analytics are decent, but hardly inspired or delightful. I'm looking seriously at both Aweber and Emma... and this thread has motivated me to consider MailChimp too.
http://FeedmailPro.com is great for RSS based email campaigns.
The way I look at it, might as well make the email a blog post (for Google juice, so future people who look for it can find it, etc) and then just use an RSS to email service.
The way I look at it, might as well make the email a blog post (for Google juice, so future people who look for it can find it, etc) and then just use an RSS to email service.
You don't really say, what is it about your evolving business that dictates a change in mail provider?
That being said, depending on your volume and functionality you require, http://www.aweber.com is also an option to consider.
That being said, depending on your volume and functionality you require, http://www.aweber.com is also an option to consider.
No need to build your own when things like OEMPro and Dada Mail exist
http://octeth.com/
http://dadamailproject.com/
http://octeth.com/
http://dadamailproject.com/