Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I use Email Marketer developed by Interspire (https://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/). I have found that bringing a tool in-house offers much more flexibility. I have used online tools such as AWeber, etc. and they are very good as well. I guess it just depends on the level of control that you want/need. I wanted alot therefore I chose an in-house tool.

Interspire's tool is very simple to setup through an online wizard. Has some great features such as Split Testing, Triggers, etc.

Hope this helps.

Jim

Dear Rock,

External.

iContact, Constant Contact, and Aweber all offer the service you're looking for and they handle all the back end stuff, leaving you to simply write content.

Having this task in-house is just one more thing to fret about.

Farm it out and pay the monthly fee, and you'll be fine. If, after
a few months it's not working, try something new, even if that means bringing it in-house. But generally, I think iContact will
suit your needs just fine.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Hi, Rock

我个人认为没有问题在使用iContact或any other online service for your needs. The main question is - what works for you. You will never know what works better for you unless you test it or at least just put all numbers together and compare both ways apples to apples. Sometimes third party service saves you that precious budget money you so much need, and it may turn out that outsourcing may be cheaper than doing it yourself: outsources always are more professional in what they do for you. It also may work better if you do this in house. So, run a split test. Divide your database in two parts. Run half by yourself, another half - by a third party and look at the numbers: expense and revenue. Don't forget to calculate not only cost of your own time, but rent, electricity, depreciation - everything that you use doing it yourself. And compare with the numbers - revenue from the campaign and service cost - coming from using an outsourcer. Test at lest 4 campaigns to be able to have enough data to compare. And you will see for yourself.

I tell you from experience: sometimes even something that worked perfectly for you in the past may change the way you don't imagine. And when it comes to marketing, research is one of the best answers to many questions.

Whatever happens
Good luck!

Natasha Chernyavskaya
Artographica
Los Angeles, CA

You would be sending from your own IP address so it could become blocked. Email Service Providers that are hosted solutions tend to Feedback Loops so that if someone clicks on the mark as spam button, the recipient is automatically unsubscribed from the list.

Hosted solutions are optimized for sending out a lot of email. Even if the solution is running on your systems, you still are likely sending it out through your Internet Service Provider (ISP). It is unlikely that your ISP will want you sending out 20,000 emails.

You should at least evaluate some hosted solutions. A good way to do that is to do a free trial of a few solutions and see which service and the support offered matches best with your objectives.

I work theStreamSend email marketingand you might want to consider us as possibility.

Use a 3rd party solution, but ensure that your email list was permission-based. The 3rd party providers work hard to get emails don't get blocked by spam filters by ensuring that addresses adhere to the CAN-SPAM regulations.