I’m tired of paying money to Aweber every month for my mailings. Now, considering to host my own mass email delivery software on my own servers. I found 12all (activcampaign.com) email marketing software as well as Oempro (octeth.com). Any experiences with both of these solutions? They both seem to be impressive.
By the way, I send appr. 250,000 emails per month on behalf of my customers. I believe I can handle the delivery part of the task, I have mid-level know-how.
The mistake of sending yourself is thinking that email is about the act of being able to send… there’s much more to it than that. In short Email Service Providers (ESPs) are essentially providing frontend tools that you see to match an extensive professional services team that is responsible for building reputation to get your message into the inbox. As you move up the pricing ladder this becomes more notable with features like dedicated IPs and entire deliverablity teams able to help review and debug a campaign.
Even if you have the best tool and an ISP that is comfortable with you doing bulk emailings (no personal accounts and very, very few business ones allow this) you’ll have a major impact on delivery rates. Your new ip address won’t have any history. It won’t be on white lists. It may get on blacklists. And the higher your volume is, the more automation will kick in, the more you have try and figure out what rule is getting in the way and hope whoever you’re told to ask for help at an ISP responds back.
Ted thanks for your reply. Yes, but I’m willing to give it a try I will try with Oempro (octeth.com) front-end email marketing software and PowerMTA (port25.com) mail server. Let’s see how it will go If I can not make it happen within 30 days, I will go with a hosted solution such as Sendloop.com.
By the way, I think I will need a good data center to host my email delivery server. Any suggestions?
I agree with Ted, the time spent on maintaining server deliverability, and the lost sales from decreased deliveries equate to more than what you save. You might want to consider a middle ground service provider such as amazon SES that you can ramp up and offload capacity from aweber while comparing receptivity.
Thanks but I don’t trust all those “review” sites out there. They smell like affiliation or paid reviews.
Since my last post, I tried 12all (not satisfied), then tried Oempro (cool enough but self-hosted mass email delivery requires dedicated time :() so I switched to Sendloop.com.
I have to agree with the others here that hosting the entire process yourself is just a recipe for disaster. Most of these services provide a plethora of benefits for an extremely low monthly cost (or sometimes no cost with MailChimp) relative to doing it yourself.
If you are fixated on handling much of the process in-house, I urge you to check out a service such as SendGrid. Essentially you would still manage the list management process (pay attention to CAN-SPAM requirements) but the actual sending of the emails and basic reporting is handled by SendGrid. This gives you ultimate flexibility in managing your user interface while still achieving professional delivery mechanisms.
Add me to the list of people that are against going it alone. It simply doesn’t work and everywhere else I have been employed at uses a third-party provider to handle email.
The simple fact is that most email is unwanted, even if it isn’t spam.
The one tool that I can suggest is Eloqua, which is one of the best email marketing tool. Its quite costlier, but worth the money.
Moreover, a little advice, Are all those contacts you have got on your database opt-in ones? If not dont proceed doing the campaign, if you do, you will risk your server and even domain.
I’m using Atomic Email Studio, its a complete email marketing solution. It can auto detect your server smtp settings.
Purchased with 30% off discount link from <snip>
I will try with Oempro (