Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

If the desktop version transmits email through your own server/ISP you may wish to stay with the online service. It is much easier to leave delivery/blacklist management issues with the service provider.

-Greg Hill
Trinity Search Engine Marketing

For what it costs to use, I'd stay with a Web-based version.

Email Labs, Constant Contact, any of the major players I think will work well. If your needs change (list exceeded 10k) a different company may be much cheaper and be a better solution, but just shop around.

I would definitely agree with TrinitySEM in saying be careful if you plan to send emails from in-house. It may look cheaper, but the added work and worry can easily off-set that "savings" you expected.

Other companies you can look into are: Strongmail, Omniture, Boca Network, and Delivra. There are a LOT more of course, but it at least gives you a few to begin with.

Good luck. :)

Definitely online. It's much easier to manage the opt-outs, clean the list, check click throughs and bounces.

Compare features (like analytics, autoresponders, templates, and quality of customer service) before you switch. I'm having good results with AWeber.

The best priced and feature rich service I have found for online email sending is Awebber https://tinyurl.com/296jlg

To continue with DIY, low cost but better capabilities than Constant Contact, check out MyEmma from Emma Marketing, MailChimp, and SubscriberMail. Emma & SubscriberMail have large list size limits, good segmentation, excellent tracking, and all the deliverability management you need.

Absolutely stick with a web-based ESP. In an era where more people are working from home or traveling for business, you can access your campaigns at anytime anywhere in the world, even from Blackberrys and IPhones.

As far as costs though, I think CC is still the least inexpensive but here's what I would ask:

-How big are your lists?
-How often do you send out per month/per year?

Based on that number, you can get a better estimate of how much a pay-per-use system would cost you and what your best value is.

-Josh The Email Marketing Guy

The only scenario where someone would want to consider a software solution is if they have their own servers in a real server facility.

Otherwise, choose a service and the the services servers and Internet connections do the heavy lifting.

I can recommend groupmail 5 - it is a free download and easy to use. 10k is a very tiny number in real terms and depending on how many mails per month you are sending (I am guessing just 1 or 2) then it is more than sufficient for your needs.

Since it is a free download, you will have to do a little work to manage your DB yourself but it is just few minutes per week.

I am not a fan of hosted solutions such as constant contact because their usage costs get high once you start to build a decent size DB.

I have a great deal of experience in email marketing sending around 4M mails per month right now so if you would like any assistance or further advise I am happy to share ideas and knowledge.

matthewanxa at gmail dot com