Monday, 19 November 2007
Email Newsletters Solutions: pain and doubt
Sending out newsletters to your customers has never been cheaper thanks to the Internet. Sending out newsletters to your customers has never been more frustrating, complicated and ineffectual thanks to the internet.
Take me back to the good old days. Printing out labels from a list of customers using a mail merge in Microsoft word. Sticking labels onto envelopes and licking stamps. Hard to believe that I could long for this old fashioned way of keeping in touch with customers--but I do.
Here I sit pondering how to get myself out of S_it with one of our most important clients. Here is some background. Way, way back in time we introduced our client to b-central, yes another Microsoft solution. B-central served us faithfully for over five years. In that time we built a database of over 6000 customers and faithfully sent them emails about events, new products and of course SALES. It was pretty easy to use and relatively cost effective. But Bill decided to pull the plug and we were left searching for a new email newsletter solution.
Always keen to promote open source solutions we migrated our client to PHP list. A great bit of software that we have successfully used since 2002. It all went smoothly. We imported our massive list of clients, set up templates, tested and tested again. Then we even sent out a few newsletters. Then last week it went pear shaped. Our host, ironically Pair, shut us down. Here is what they had to say:
So much for an open source solution...bye, bye php list. Now the search is on for a pay as you play hosted email newsletter solution. Here is our short list:
campaignmonitor
mailchimp
verticalresponse
constantcontact
Our web developer likes mail chimp. My mates at Steam Whistle Brewing, who turned me onto bcentral, have since moved onto vertical response. Another one of our clients, Crystalight, loves vertical response too. Stay tuned for an update on our clients response to this conundrum.
Take me back to the good old days. Printing out labels from a list of customers using a mail merge in Microsoft word. Sticking labels onto envelopes and licking stamps. Hard to believe that I could long for this old fashioned way of keeping in touch with customers--but I do.
Here I sit pondering how to get myself out of S_it with one of our most important clients. Here is some background. Way, way back in time we introduced our client to b-central, yes another Microsoft solution. B-central served us faithfully for over five years. In that time we built a database of over 6000 customers and faithfully sent them emails about events, new products and of course SALES. It was pretty easy to use and relatively cost effective. But Bill decided to pull the plug and we were left searching for a new email newsletter solution.
Always keen to promote open source solutions we migrated our client to PHP list. A great bit of software that we have successfully used since 2002. It all went smoothly. We imported our massive list of clients, set up templates, tested and tested again. Then we even sent out a few newsletters. Then last week it went pear shaped. Our host, ironically Pair, shut us down. Here is what they had to say:
Hello,Further investigation revealed that bulk emails are the bane of web hosting companies everywhere. Here is what my mentor Brad Baker from XYZulu has to say on the subject:
The permissions were removed on this directory because it contains mailing
list software that was being used to send out several thousand messages at
once. Mailing list software is not permitted on shared hosting accounts as
explained in our resource usages policies:
http://www.pair.com/policies/resource.html
This 'problem' is becoming a universal issue due to rises in spam. It's a long story, but to be brief, if hotmail say, receives a certain number of incoming emails from a single ip address, their spam blocking software swings into action, and blocks the entire server.
It's a huge deal now, and one server's admins spend lots of time on keeping email under control and not getting blacklisted.
So much for an open source solution...bye, bye php list. Now the search is on for a pay as you play hosted email newsletter solution. Here is our short list:
campaignmonitor
mailchimp
verticalresponse
constantcontact
Our web developer likes mail chimp. My mates at Steam Whistle Brewing, who turned me onto bcentral, have since moved onto vertical response. Another one of our clients, Crystalight, loves vertical response too. Stay tuned for an update on our clients response to this conundrum.
posted by bbm
