Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform?

[YouGotMyMoney]

Ok, I see at HostGator, you can host your own CRM...dreamhost...you can host your own PBX...etc etc

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a free or paid product that will let you host your email marketing software?

 

[Guest]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

What is "email marketing" software?

I use phpList on my server. It's free and works great. Installing it requires knowing how to create a MySQL database. It's not as full-featured as Constant Contact by a long-shot, but it has most of what you need to do what I call email marketing.... but I'm not sure this is what you are talking about.

Another one I've used is called dadamail but I like phpList much better.

If you define what you mean by email marketing maybe I can be of better assistance.

Al
I'm here for this whole year

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

Thanks Al3.

I simply mean I upload a list of emails, and it will automatically email it for me and tell me who opened it, how many were delivered etc etc.

I've used MailChimp, but they are a little testy....bounced me twice for simply setting up an autoresponder for insurance leads, and a few too many people clicked unsubcribe-

 

[Guest]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

The phpList program will do what you want. See this:

phplist.com : Information : phplist Features

 

[Justin Bilyj]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

I know bluehost has a icontact integrated with a whole bunch of email options, email list options, and autoresponders to set up.

 

[radiusbob]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

Mark,

Spd E-Letter is a solution that you can run on your Host Gator server (as long as you are running a Windows IIS Server). We use it to manage multiple campaigns. Not a lot of bells and whistles similar to what Al mentioned for a comparable PHP Software version, but it gets the job done. You'll need to work with your host or developer to get it up and running, but it is pretty straight forward after installation.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

Just be careful. Sending emails yourself - if enough people report it as spam you'll be blacklisted. You can even get blacklisted from your own ISP for sending too many emails in an "X" period of time.

Happened to me. I was sending over 1,000 emails to association members and I got nailed. Took me days to be able to send emails again after proving I wasn't spamming.

But you're right - these email hosts such as Constant Contact can be tough. I just went through a security review with CC for blasting out emails to my new site's subscribers and not a single person has clicked unsubscribe. During the review I had to prove the origins of my list. It was short - 100% of my list comes from opt-in subscribers from my site.

 

[djs]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

Hosting your own email marketing software is more work (and riskier) than you think.

As Al said, phpList will probably do what you want, but it doesn't have the automated piece of mailing today, then automatically on days 3,5,7,10,14, etc. It does do very good at mailing to a large list of emails though.

To really answer your question requires knowing how many emails you are sending out and how frequently. Then, how you want to use it, whether its an autoresponder type (as you suggested) or a newsletter style (more of what MailChimp is for). These are significantly different use cases.

There are very inexpensive solutions for both, but if you host yourself, you will almost always get listed as a spammer and very little of your email will make it through to the end user. This will happen in a blink of an eye. Also, many hosting companies limit the amount of email you can send per hour or per day. If you are not aware of this, your emails can be sitting for days waiting to go out, or totally discarded, or, as often happens, your account locked.

Any decent hosting company will require you only use opt-in lists, which leads you back to the very problem you ran into with MailChimp.

Sending out bulk email is a challenge. It can be done. There are lots of tools to help you do this (in a legitimate way). It's been a while since I've done anything significant in bulk email though.

For the record, my wife and I used to run an ecommerce store. Our newsletter had about 15000 subscribers. We managed this with phpList and it worked well. It does deal with bounces, unsubscribes, read counts, html/text multi-part, etc. This is not an exceptionally large list by any means, but it required working with the hosting company to allow us to setup for the mailing. I had to throttle how fast the emails were sent out. By default, a lot of companies limit you to sending a few hundred emails an hour, and maybe 500 a day. Some are much, much lower than this.

Dan

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

You'll need to contact your ISP regarding their TOS. I have Verizon FIOS and buried in their TOS is I cannot use my personal account as a business account. They have special accounts (very expensive) for business.

They flagged me days after I started sending thousands of emails and said it was a TOS violation. On top of that, everyone else blocked me - Comcast, Yahoo, etc...

I knew something was wrong when I was sending emails but no one was getting them.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

Re: Recommendations for Hosting Your Own Email Marketing Platform

But you're right - these email hosts such as Constant Contact can be tough. I just went through a security review with CC for blasting out emails to my new site's subscribers and not a single person has clicked unsubscribe. During the review I had to prove the origins of my list. It was short - 100% of my list comes from opt-in subscribers from my site.

Yeah, your not kidding JP, these email marketing services are a real PITA. My idea was just to use a throw away domain like " affordable-health-insurance-for-uninsurables.com" that way if the domain get's black listed I should be ok?