what will the museum of the future be like?

Bulk email service (for e-newsletters)

Does anyone have advice/recommendations/warnings about email newsletter services? We are currently using a bulk-email module in our CMS (MySource) to send out our monthly "Artmail" and weekly "Art After Hours" update, plus other, less frequent emails. However, this puts quite a strain on our server when each email is sent out and opened (we have a very large subscriber base!). So, I am now investigating 3 bulk email services: PatronMail, Vertical Response and MailChimp. Have any of you used one of these? What kind of experience have you had? Or do you use another solution that might be even better?

Tags: email, newsletter

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Permalink Reply by Seb Chan on November 4, 2009 at 12:02am

We use Campaign Master (http://www.campaignmaster.com.au/) now which is good and can be handled entirely by the marketing team. Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/) is very good if you want to have a lot of control over design etc. We used to use Traction from Massmedia but it is best for organisations which are cross platform as they focus on integration with SMS/MMS too.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Cooper on November 8, 2009 at 1:46pm

Hi Seb, Thanks for the advice. Campaign Monitor seems to do everything we need - very elegantly. The only thing is they charge (a fair bit, relatively speaking) per email, and this would make each of our mail-outs quite expensive. We're getting a personal demo of Campaign Master tomorrow (Monday). Cheers, Jonathan

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Permalink Reply by Seb Chan on November 8, 2009 at 2:30pm

Everything costs - even the free stuff.

The good thing about paying for bulk email is that it forces you to prioritise database cleanups and the removal of people who don't read your spam. It also starts to engender a mindset that focusses on what the emails deliver rather than seeing them as an end in themselves (the "oh we just sent that to 20,000 people - job done" mentality). You should be able to get down to $0.01 per recipient rates with high volume, possibly even lower.

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Permalink Reply by K Landon on November 18, 2009 at 1:47pm

We use Vertical Response. They offer non-profits 10,000 emails a month (for free), which is more than sufficient for our needs.
They've been great. It was easy to set up, it's easy to use, and they provide all sorts of tracking.

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Permalink Reply by Vincent Roman on November 30, 2009 at 8:57am

The real advantage of using a service such a campaign monitor or vertical response from a technical standpoint is that they will tick all the check boxes in terms of making sure their servers and domains are not tarnished and flagged as spammers by the major mail domains such as hotmail, yahoo et al and they wil avoid being hit by black listings. It takes the hassle out of the system admin side of things for your mailing lists.