We've done alot of work with email marketing services. The setup of the server is vitally important as there are so many hidden things in the way they are configured that can automatically break the game at the client end if their spam filters do reverse checking on the source server. This is the benefit of paid services like Mailchimp. The servers are configured by specialists for optimum delivery. If you plan on doing this yourself, you want to allow for some research in how this all works. If the server isn't setup right, it won't matter how your code works, or what your content is, you won't even get that far.
The way around this is to use your own software in a normal hosting environment, and set it up to use an external SMTP service. Best of both worlds so to speak. www.smtp.com is a good place to start to get an idea of the cost of such a service. As for the software, I've had alot of experience with Email Marketer from Interspire.http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/. My experience with it and the company is both good and bad. Their licensing changes in the past have been very ugly, and at one stage they were removing complaint after complaint from their forums and even banned some users for hearsay. Haven't upgraded or been there for a while so not sure now. The product is fairly good. The original was great. Some of the upgrades have been a little buggy however and some users have chosen not to upgrade. My last look at them was about a year ago, so a trial might be worth a shot. The software will certainly do everything you have listed and then some. There was even talk of SMS messaging at one stage. Aaron ----- Original Message ----- From: Olwen Williams To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 11:55 AM Subject: [phpug] Mailing List Software I tried to send this from my gmail account but maybe I messed up the subscription there because it never made it. One of my customers has a need for some versatile mailing list software that has several features. 1.. Must allow customers to come from a number of sources (I can push them into a database from my sources) 2.. Must allow customers to subscribe/unsubscribe 3.. Customers must be able to select different emails that they will get 4.. Preferably has some reasonably comprehensive survey components 5.. Easy interface for entering emails. 6.. Emails sent in the back end (i.e. schedule them to be sent and it just happens over a period of hours) 7.. Some emails will be sent automatically when something triggers them. This may come from several sources. They have a Joomla site, but they also have other software that supplies leads. I've discussed it briefly with one developer who said he had had a 50% failure rate sending to Xtra (falling into spam filters) and suggested that a commercial service might be better. I'm prepared to consider that if it had the flexibility for us to push our leads into it. -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
