Show HN: SendGlide – Beautiful email marketing for small businesses | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SendGlide – Beautiful email marketing for small businesses

sendglide.com

31 pointskirkus42 comments

This is owlsend (owlsend.com) re-branded after causing confusion with sendowl (sendowl.com). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068154

I'm glad to see they fixed their logo so it isn't a blue owl.

I'm disappointed to see that they still haven't made it more clear that the $29 / month is a flat rate to use their interface and the end user still pays $1 / 10,000 emails to SES. If you send a weekly email (4/month) to 10,000 subscribers, you pay $29 + $4 = $33. If you send a daily (30 / month) email to 10,000 subscribers you'll pay $29 + $30 = $59. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9070921

Yes, You got it right.

If you have 50,000 subscribers and you send bi-weekly emails or roughly 10 campaigns every month.

You would be paying $49(Flat Fee) + 10*($5) = $99

Any other email service charges roughly $250 or more for the same. So overall there is huge cost saving with SES along with SendGlide.

If you are willing to join SendGlide, Feel free to jump on the live chat on the site or send an email. http://www.sendglide.com/contact-us/

I saw Mail Chimp at $200 a month for 10,000 and thought.. really? However, when I look at Mail Chimp it seems to be $75.

So: 10K subscribers, Monthly charge, Unlimited sendlimit

Mail Chimp - $75 - http://mailchimp.com/pricing/all/

SendGlide - $29 - http://www.sendglide.com/

Still favourable for you but significantly different. I appreciate that pricing is always complicated. Am I missing something?

Ahhh yeh you're right...we were looking at MailChimp "Pay As You Go" plans.

Maybe I'm an old fart but I don't like fancy emails because they never display right. Seems like simpler is better for email. Keep it short and to the point.

Are people finding that the fancy emails convert better?

Yikes, I wouldn't want to compete on price. I personally believe it's the features beyond MailChimp where the action is. Let MailChimp have the low-end. It's going to be really hard to fight them for crumbs at the table.

I'm sending out a newsletter every now and then. A simple text newsletter that goes out to about 50,000 subscribers. I send it via a PHP script I wrote myself. It can do a/b tests, bounce- and optout-handling. Every time I see commercial offerings like this one, I wonder: Would I gain anything by using them? They seem pretty expensive to me.

My selfmade solution also can do HTML mailings, but I never was able to measure any benefit of styled newsletters over text. So I usually use just text.

Yeh you can better measure stats like open rate, CTR and deliverability. It's especially good for marketers and entrepreneurs that want an easy to use interface to manage their email marketing campaigns.

As far as I know, there is no good way to measure open rate. You can see if images in your html email are loaded. But that could also happen automatically or in a preview pane that is displayed by default.

The reason why I shy away from measuring CTR is that I then cannot give people the real url. I like to directly give them the final url instead of some intermediate page. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer that.

How do you measure deliverability?

You're right, deliverability can be measured via pixel image itself. That is the same process that we follow at SendGlide.

Google caches those images though. So it isn't accurate for gmail.

Only for repeat opens. The original open still accesses a particular URL specific to that recipient so the open is recorded even if Gmail hides IP, browser, OS, and other data via their proxy. If the user doesn't view the images, that open is never recorded anyway. So, the caching doesn't actually affect the open rate.

They cache them before the email is even read. They also cache images across gmail accounts.

Could you use a url parameter on the end of the real url (e.g. example.com/page?source=email_[date]), and then use the history object to strip the param once they land on the url (modern browsers)?

Deliverability is going to be substantially better. IPs from commercial providers are trusted among ISPs and have a better chance not being flagged as spam.

What would be a good way to measure that?

Your bounce rate and reasons.

A mail that goes into the spam folder does not bounce.

You're right for the most part, but I hope that will change soon. I've been working on a new spam filter for a while, it's in testing on my mail server for a handful of customers, and quite a bit of stuff from constantcontact, sendgrid, Amazon, and even Gmail are getting caught by it.

The unfortunate thing is that every time there's a new trusted mailing service with a good reputation, spammers flock to it.

Not in this instance. They use your AWS SES account, which you could just as easily use from your own script so deliverability will be equal.

A rookie question if you don't mind me asking.

How does your setup work? Have you thought about open-sourcing or selling the script?

I am using MailChimp for weekendhacker but i always feel like it's way too bloated for my needs.

I have a small email marketing app, that can integrate text as well as html. (based on Asp.Net MVC and WebApi)

It also allows conditionals (Mustache like syntax) and multiple languages in one "Send"... Haven't bootstrapped it though, it's for personal use and because i have multiple clients in french, english and dutch...

Most of the time, i use it to send the "launch" letter for a new website, with the mailing list that i collected from their landing page.

it just makes my life easier :)

We use to use http://sendy.co/ which is a self hosted solution, but doesn't really offer anything in the way of templates and lacks some features. We ultimately left as we now use Intercom but I'd be interested in seeing how this service evolves.

Yeh with Sendy you need to install it and configure it on your hosting. You also need to update it every time new features get released. With SendGlide we take care of all the hosting for you. All you need to do is log in to the SendGlide app and away you go. All new features are free for customers. We're really focusing on making sending emails and managing email campaigns easy and simple.

The email template builder at SendGlide is really fantastic. You would definitely love it. Give it a try.

Might want to set up redirects, canonical or robots.txt on http://www.owlsend.com/ as right now you're double serving your content to Google and is not optimal from an SEO standpoint, let alone confusing for customers.

Thanks for the feedback. I will add redirect to SendGlide.

Having used Constant Contact for a while now I'm kind of biased towards them but I'm always looking at new ways and services for doing things. What is the biggest difference between SendGlide and them/what do you have that they don't?

I think there is a pretty small market for small businesses who want to use a service like this, but want to / are capable of setting up their own Amazon SES setup.

The small business market is already hard since budgets are small and support needs are high.

We know setting SES might be little hard for the first time and that's the reason we have written thorough guides which users can follow to setup their SES account. http://www.sendglide.com/setup-amazon-ses-account-with-sendg...

Potential savings over long run is pretty high once someone setups and connect SES with SendGlide.

Other than that we are always available to help incase someone needs any help in setting up their SES account.

If you willing to join us, you can contact us anytime via contact link on our website.

Thanks Neeraj

I thought the same thing. The product looks great, but setting up SES is something that should not be required.

Was a thread about this a couple of days ago also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068154 . Looks like they changed their name since then.

There was another company called SendOwl and it got there attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068741

So probably they had to sort out a different name quickly...

Broken on mobile. Menu takes up the whole screen so I couldn't read anything about the product.

Thanks for the feedback. Will fix that.

Site seems really broken on iOS

For me on iPhone, the page would be fine if only the entire almost-full-screen-size navigation didn't switch to fixed positioning and block most of the page once I scroll past it.

Small business are business that send 10000 emails per month?

Yes.

I own 3 small retail stores. Our subscriber list is about 28,000.

What do you use to manage your email marketing?

Any way to have more than 100K subscribers?

Yeh, how many subscribers do you have? Feel fee to jump on the live chat on the site or send an email. http://www.sendglide.com/contact-us/

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