We asked SitePoint authors what developer toys they would want for Christmas, then managed to source them — without relying on Santa.
Despite the buzz in social media marketing, email marketing isn’t dead and won’t be any time soon.
If you own a blog or company website, and you don’t have an email list of your blog readers or users of your product, you really should start now. Having a list of past and potential customers you can turn to when you have a new product is invaluable.
Why I wanted Sendy
While it’s hugely valuable, email marketing can be expensive, especially when your website or company is just starting out. The cost of sending newsletters to, say, 10,000 subscribers via larger email providers can cost over $75. The larger the subscriber base, the more the bill adds up.
For a writer like myself whose blog posts seldom generate revenue (yet!), I consider it an extravagance to pay a large fee to send a weekly or monthly round-up of my published articles. When the SitePoint team asked me for my Christmas wishlist, my first pick was Sendy, a self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable email via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
The experience so far
So far the Sendy experience has been fantastic. I have only had to pay $0.10 per thousand emails sent, which is very cheap. I’ve also had great delivery results and the support from forum and email is pretty fast.
Unlike other email marketing provider, Sendy doesn’t ship with pre-built email templates and an intuitive template builder. Since it’s self-hosted, you will have to install and get it up and running yourself, or pay the Sendy team or a developer to get it done for you. But this also means it’s more flexible, and can be perfectly tailored to your needs.
What would you do with a free Sendy license? Answer in the comments, we’ll pick the best answers and give away 5 Sendy licenses to the winners.
Collins AgbonghamaCollins is a web developer and freelance writer. Creator of the popular ProfilePress and MailOptin WordPress plugins. When not wrangling with code, you can find him writing at his personal blog or on Twitter.
