Things Your Startup Should Know about Email Marketing Companies
thestartupfoundry.com
thestartupfoundry.com
I think his points are very valid, and I appreciate his "mailchimp might be perfect for you" comment. As someone who went from doing it in-house to Mailchimp, I'll offer some advice:
Try an email marketer first, and only bring it in-house if you find that the marketer can't do what you want or is too restrictive.
There are an infinite number of things to spend your time on, and sending emails (and having them look good, arrive, get stats, etc) is a huuuuge time sink. If mass emails are not the core of your business then you should be outsourcing it. Build your core, buy the rest.
(No affiliation apart from being a very satisfied customer/user)
I am the Product Manager of PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com) and we're under heavy development still, but it's always good to hear the problems that heavy users are running into with email solutions / marketing companies.
Definitely going to write them down and see how we can make sure we solve some of those problems.
Thanks Noah!
Not sure on the naming issues or trademarks, but it's definitely one of my concerns. Thanks for the refresher, I should look into it.
The setup wasn't too hard, and ntoper and a couple others were in IRC to ask questions of (and they provided some more support via email as well). I was a transition customer - started about a year ago when they were putting the polishing touches on their public offering. What I had was rather beta - no self-serve payments, reporting didn't work too well - but it's improved a lot in the last year (and even a year ago it worked for what I needed).
edit: the support was primarily me setting up domain keys and such on my end with DNS entries - the instructions weren't as clear to a non-sysadmin mortal such as myself a year ago.
So, pricing, pay as you go, IRC support and friendly people. Does that help?
iContact and Vertical Response are my next two favs, especially the latter if you send direct mail.
I've never used the enterprise solutions, but when I was researching for a client I was gravitating towards ExactTarget. You can do some pretty sophisticated rules for who gets sent what and when based on their behavior.
I really like Mailchimp so I don't want the video to be taken the wrong way but a few of our challenges were with them.
Aweber (who we used first) on the other hand got hacked (twice!) and did not bother to mention that publicly. They did the first time, http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/12/22/aweber-makes-a...
We've moved to Sendgrid.
We do pretty high-volume newsletters and are using Silverpop now and Lyris/EmailLabs before that. Silverpop is OK (the frontend UI is kinda crappy, the API is functional but ugly, and the backend is PowerMTA which is pretty solid). They don't require double opt-in and give you control over the unsubscribe process if you want it. Once you start sending millions of messages a month, the pricing on MailChimp or Constant Contact (or SendGrid for that matter) doesn't really scale.
Silverpop was also recently hacked. I imagine email service providers make for easy targets. Email addresses are easy to sell, but aren't typically protected as well as obviously valuable information like credit card numbers.
link: http://postmarkapp.com/