I used intellicontact for a while www.intellicontact.com. Free 15 day trial and didn't have any problems with it. Also tried Aweber www.aweber.com, but as there server is based in the US, US law states that you have to display your business address at the bottom of the email. I market mostly UK products, so don't want my UK subscribers knowing I'm from Ireland . That seems to be the only downside of aweber though. Can do a tonne of things.
It also depends on the size of your database. I use eCircle's ec-messenger to email 180 000 retail customers a week and find it really good. It has a whole host of useful tools included to help with segmentation, tracking and so forth.
I've had another look at phplist over the weekend and it looks OK so far. One BIG problem is that it doesn't have proper support for text versions of emails. It just tries to make a text version out of whatever you put in the HTML editor. If you're making an email which is mainly image-based it comes out as a right mess, if it comes out at all.
It looks good for quite basic text-heavy newsletters, but if anyone can recommend a way of directly controlling the text alternative message in phplist I'm all ears.
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Stephen Pratley Shine Marketing Affiliate Programme Management
I'm currently enjoying using www.campaignmonitor.com - their nice web 2.0 interface and flat pricing model was about the best of the ones I found when I was looking. My lists are quite small at present, so I'm not sure how well it'll work when they get bigger.
It's simple to intergrate into your site and you can customise your own confirm pages as well, so you can offer a nice offer when they succeed on completing the double opt-in.
I use www.pure360.com - not the cheapest on the market, but definitely not the most expensive.. Good tracking and easy to use interface.. Works out about 45quid per month for 1000 emails and I think it was about 200quid to set up.. Speak to Adrian and tell him Jon from Jordons referred you as we should both get some free booze if you decide to sign up! http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/images_a4u/icons/icon10.gif
Talking
After a few experiments today I'm rapidly going off phplist.
No inbuilt tracking of opens & clicks
No way of controlling the format & content of text emails
Generally seems slow and hangs a lot even when only sending small batches
That was on a very small list too, less than 2k.
Next stop...Listmessenger.com, although with no function to count & clear out bounced emails it's got a black mark against it before I even start
. That seems to be the only downside of aweber though. Can do a tonne of things.
Re: newsletters
