Ask YC: Email marketing tool | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Email marketing tool

8 pointsmchang1612 comments

I am looking for a low-cost email marketing tool that I can use to start sending newsletters and messages to potential customers. I want to find a reliable provider that has high deliverability, but that isn't too pricey. I'm a start-up, after all.

I considered building this myself, but I'm guessing that there are lots of good products already on the market. Can anyone suggest something that they've used?

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I was in the same position about two years ago and, due to the high cost of services like ConstantContact/CampaignMonitor, I voted to build my own. After two years, I had built my list up to about 10k users and my web host finally came to me and asked me to move it off to another app/site/VPS.

It took me about a day to implement, I guess, and I think it saved me probably $2500-$5000 even when I consider the time value of my development time.

I advise that, if you can charge yourself less than $150/hr for your time and you will be sending to a small amount of ppl initially, build it yourself.

WebPower ( http://www.webpower.nl/ ) runs opt-in mailing lists with quick import options and an AJAX interface. The client list ( http://www.webpower.nl/wp.php/webpower/klanten/ ) is quite impressive.

How come there isn't an YC company doing pretty and easy to create and manage email marketing?

Because there aren't that many YC companies, and because email marketing is usually spam, making it morally questionable.

is spam morally questionable? or is it just frowned upon by social norms

If you think there's really a need for it, start one yourself and apply to YC with it.

http://www.madmimi.com/ is new / neat / ajaxy. Check it out, it's got some nice features.

CampaignMonitor.com is outstanding unless you're doing high volume/spammy stuff.

I'm concerned that you say "potential customers". Where are you getting the list of people/emails?

Fair question! I won't be mailing anyone that doesn't give me permission...my application will require people to login and give me permission to email them...after I do that, they may or may not become customers. But I won't message anyone that doesn't opt-in!

my company uses eloqua. I have a feeling that they might not satisfy the "low cost" requirement, though.

try http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp : it was free for 60 days - dont know whether they still run that offer.

I use ConstantContact for my email distribution at http://OnStartups.com. Has worked well for me.

Disclaimer: Gail Goodman, the CEO of ConstantContact is on the board of my startup. But, I was a fan of the company well before that.

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