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Recommended E-mail Mktg/newsletter Providers?
Posted By: The Radial Group on 8/23/2006 9:39 PM (CST)	500 Points
Greetings! Our firm has a list of several thousand subscribers to whom we e-mail a weekly newsletter plus various e-mail marketing campaigns. We acquire subscriptions through PPC, SEO, + traditional marketing, networking, word of mouth, and referral. We plan to continue doing all content and design in-house. We're currently using a reliable but barebones provider, so not a lot of functionality re: running campaigns against a subset of our list on an ad-hoc basis, for example. Reporting is at the individual campaign level only with no ability to aggregate across multiple campaigns (for example, we can't report on who has clicked through on multiple campaigns unless we manually compile the data in Excel or whatever). We'd like to find a provider that offers more functionality. Any recommendations based on first-hand experience of fully-featured e-mail marketing service providers (like Constant Contact, for example)? I'd love to know specifically what you find most valuable about the providers you recommend. TIA Leslie

Posted by: BrandMill	Accepted Answer
8/23/2006 9:59 PM (CST)
Constant Contact is awesome, have used them for over 3 years. Other good choices are Subscriber Amil adn so many more. CC is a good fit because: 1. Lots of easy to custom templates 2. Great support 3. Back end analytics is good 4. Nice forward friend feature 5. Spam guide feature too 6. Cost structure is most reasonable too

Posted by: Mark	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 1:37 AM (CST)
Just wanted to point out that ConstantContact has a free trial option, so you can explore the features at leisure to see if they match your specific needs. For my modest needs, CC is fine. But I'm not sure it has all the cross-campaign aggregate reporting features you're looking for.

Posted by: carrie77	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 6:35 AM (CST)
MarketingProfs Vendor Selector for Email Breoadcasters compares over 100 vendors.

Posted by: MRowland	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 7:53 AM (CST)
Hi Leslie, The Mansell Group handles email and newsletters for many organizations, both large and small using a great product called Enable Mail. They work with many of our clients as well. Mansell Group clients include NEA, Time Warner, AirTran, Moen, and AARP (all of whome are very happy with the service and pricing). The flexibility, features, measurement capabilities, and ease of use are the main reasons why so many of their clients have stayed with them. I would give them a call. Allen Nance is their president and is listed in the Vendor Selector. Good Luck! Mike Impact Interactions

Posted by: The Radial Group	Author Response
8/24/2006 8:50 AM (CST)
Thanks, all. We've tried CC and it's better than what we have but Mark's right - it doesn't seem to have the reporting we're hoping to find. We'll definitely check out the vendor selector and specifically Mansell Group/Enable Mail. I'll leave the question open a little longer and see what else turns up.

Posted by: amandavega	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 11:45 AM (CST)
We use Lyris. It's your highest end provider, which has been around for years and years. It tracks multiple links within email, and cross references among separate lists so you can get reports for campaigns as you mention in your question. The only issue is that licensing is pretty expensive. You can always go to an agency, like us, and get their pricing to have them integrate you into their Lyris, for a fee of around half a cent to a cent per email. We handle a lot of email for clients like that who need more functionality and reporting, but cannot afford Lyris or higher end competitors. Lyris also has cool features such as redirect campaigns, meaning, if you set it up right, you can automatically send subsequent offers (different offers for each segment even) to those that say open the email, but don't click, or open, click, but don't sign up. It's a neat program that we have Cox Cable set up on to help generate more subscribers by enticing offers to those that are "almost buyers." You can find out more by visiting our site at [URL deleted by staff]

Posted by: mschlossberg	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 3:32 PM (CST)
We have Vertical response but have integrated it with our CRM system salesforce.com to track all activity. I am able to attach multiple campaigns to leads and use dashboards to track.

Posted by: rbauman*	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 3:40 PM (CST)
I've also used Vertical Response, but I haven't needed detailed reporting functionality so I can't say whether it has what you need. You can also look at Epsilon Interactive.

Posted by: The Radial Group	Author Response
8/24/2006 4:04 PM (CST)
Re: Vertical Response/salesforce.com - did you have to do custom development for the data integration using salesforce.com's toolkit (or some other technical solution) or was there an API already available to let you move data back and forth? How was the support from both vendors as you got your integration in place? Were the dashboards existing functionality or new stuff your firm had to create? Thanks!

Posted by: jillm	Accepted Answer
8/24/2006 6:12 PM (CST)
I can't say enough about Emma -- their reporting is great (exportable, comparisons, etc.), search ability is fabulous, they're very affordable, and the interface is VERY user friendly. Definitely try Emma... www.myemma.com.

Posted by: DWomack	Accepted Answer
8/25/2006 10:19 AM (CST)
Hi Leslie. We started using ExactTarget (http://email.exacttarget.com/ETWeb/default.aspx) about 8-9 months ago and have been very happy. This choice was made only after an extensive review. A technology consultant narrowed the field to 3-4 providers. We then had all of these providers come in and give us their full pitch. We felt Exact Target offered the most power and flexibility for the price (but it isn't cheap). Support and training are very good, it has all the reporting functionality you would expect (or need) and their database management (list manipulation) is great. They also do a great job with deliverability. Good luck, Dan

Posted by: The Radial Group	Author Response
8/25/2006 2:03 PM (CST)
Thanks for the info on Emma - I had seen some promotional stuff for that one and had wondered. Appreciate the Exact Target suggestion also. Definitely sounds worth checking out.

Posted by: Shelley, MProfs	Accepted Answer
8/25/2006 4:57 PM (CST)
We use myEmma for communicating with Premium members here at MarketingProfs. And for our weekly Daily Fix (blog) newsletter. Very pleased with her! (And not because she's an advertiser.)

Posted by: ngorni	Member Response
8/25/2006 6:57 PM (CST)
Try MailUp (http://www.mailupnet.com). It has cross campaign detailed statistics. The pricing calculation of the MailUp is unique: just one all inclusive fee, which is not depending on the number of sent e-mail messages or their size or the number of contacts in your DB; and no limit for message’s and attachment’s size. Cool new feature: image embedding. MailUp is customer-friendly and easy to the utmost degree: suggestions, from more than 120 selected active clients, are making of this web application the most user friendly service on the web.

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