Subscribe Feed (RSS)Important Features for Mailing List Software: Suggestions Needed
September 19th, 2008 by Joshua Dorkin | 9 Comments | Filed in Marketing
I’ve been using the same mailing list software for close to five years now, a platform called Dada Mail, which is a perl script. While the software is free (GREAT!), it has a lot of limitations. I have little control over bounce rates, click tracking, and other essential bits of data which are important for any email marketer.
To be honest, I’m not much of an email marketer in the first place, and I’m guessing that if I had a more advanced platform, I’d likely be further on my way.
Shopping for a New Mailing List Solution
One of the most important features that I need in a mailing list solution is a software package or web-based system that will allow me to directly input data from my own forms. Most packages that I’ve found don’t allow it.
A Look at AWeber
Sadly, one of the most highly recommended email marketing software solutions I’ve found, AWeber.com does not have an API that allows this. Their package has EVERY other feature that I could want, including:
- Autoresponders
- Unlimited Campaigns
- HTML Email Templates
- Email Deliverability (NOTE: I’ve heard from a few people that their delivery rate is WAY higher than most other software)
- Blog Newsletters
- Email Web Analytics
- Subscriber Management
Essentially, they’ve got everything I need, and the price is decent ($19 for 0-500 subscriber and $149 for 10,000-25,000 where I fall in), but that API issue is going to keep me away. The only other downside I’ve found is that if you have multiple lists, duplicate subscribers count twice for their pricing schema. It isn’t a huge deal, but we often create lists that are subsets of our master list for marketing purposes and this could
end up costing some real money.
Is PHPList the One?
I haven’t found another web-based piece of software yet that does everything that AWeber does with an API so I can use it with my forms, so I’ve been hunting for server based applications instead. I hope to find something soon . . . there seems to be one called PhpList that has some promise, but I haven’t fully gone through and tested it yet.
Does anyone have any mailing list software suggestions? If you’ve read the post, you know what I’m looking for . . . let me know what you’ve got!
