Email solution - How? Who?

[wergeni]

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Hi,

been looking around on the site and see similar questions has been asked before but I can’t find any good answers. Sorry if I have missed anything and do a repeat.

I’m setting up a site and can’t settle how I should set-up the email system.

Been looking at Constant Contact and Awber’s, it’s 50/50, they seems to do the same job.

How do you sync your email list?
What I can’t get my head around is how to sync my local DB with the 3-de part supplier.
E.g User change email address, surname, new users come in, others opt-out by their settings on the site, and so on.
Do I have to export the list and then import it (text file) every time on the suppliers system?
I have a lot of different email designs depending on the users behaviour, user will change on a weekly basis what email group they will belong to.
(Optimal would be to have the email created on the fly with different modules depending on their behavior.)

How good is the tracking?
Can I track the user when it arrives on my site from the email campaign, what link the user clicked on and so on. (Admit I need to do more research here, but it’s not obvious reading on the suppliers site.)

How do you evaluate the result?
E.g Merge the tracking/report information from the supplier to the outcome on your system, e.g sign-ups, transactions or whatever you measure. Good click thru without any transactions is bad news...

Automated emails, who and how to send them?
If a user don’t trigger an action within X days I send them a automated email, for the moment it’s from my web server. I believe it would be better if this was sent from the same email server as all my other emails for spamming problems. Guess this would apply to “Welcome” emails as well...
Does anyone have a solution for this?

Last one, any recommendations on what system to use?

Hope this make sense, it’s Friday and the pub is in my mind.

Regards
Hakan

[Cheapdvds]

heres a list of free scripts that you could try to start with , dont know what they are like

Free Perl Mailing List CGI Scripts (thefreecountry.com)