The cheapest email marketing out there (Sendy) and a SaaS discussion

[alexkuzmov]

Hey forum,

So this is a quick look at Sendy.co, what it can and cant do, pros/cons, installation and setup guide.

First of, what is it?

Its a selfhosted solution for email marketing which uses only AWS SES (Cloud Email Service — Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) — Amazon Web Services) with an array of features to help you.
You can make campaigns, add lists, schedule campaigns, have mutliple users and clients login to it so they can manage their own campaigns etc.
As of writing this it can be purchased for a one time fee of $69 and every major version update costs $34 Update Sendy
Which makes it the cheapest email marketing solution out there.

Pros:

- One-time fees, saves money
- Very nice and simple design
- Full control over lists
- Automatically handles any complaints, bounces, and spam
- Autoresponders
- Subscribe Form
- Very nice reports and graphs
- Template support

Cons:

- Limited advanced features, it misses a lot of things which tools like MailCheat(Chimp), aweber, activecampaign and so on provide
- Requires tech knowledge, and a fair bit of it if you want your emails to arrive properly and be opened
- No support for other then Amazon SES
- Shit code, its just... my eyes hurt...


Setup:

1. Buy domain (Recomend: Buy a domain name - Register cheap domain names from $0.99 - Namecheap)
2. AWS account from here: Create Account
3. If you dont have SES setup already, you should do it on this step.
Basically you need to:
- Enable the Workmail (the online UI for AWS email inboxes) Amazon WorkMail – Amazon Web Services
- Verify the domain and an email address: Getting Started with Amazon Simple Email Service | Cloud Email Service | Amazon Web Services
- Set the proper DKIM, SPF and DMARC DNS records for the domain to ensure full mail delivery and verification.

What is DKIM - dmarcian

dmarcian helps you better understand what DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is, and how to effectively use it.

dmarcian.com

What is SPF - dmarcian

Understanding SPF. Learn more about Sender Policy Framework (SPF), how it works, and its common misconceptions.

dmarcian.com

Overview – dmarc.org

- Create a user identity AWS IAM | Identity and Access Management | Amazon Web Services and create access credentials for it to be able to send email using the AWS SMTP server
4. For hosting the Sendy software I recommend using a lightsail server with Ubuntu: VPS, web hosting pricing—Amazon Lightsail—Amazon Web Services

NOTE: You can choose to create the lightsail server with a LAMP stack from the get go, but I`ll provide an installation guide below for Ubuntu, since I prefer to do things one at a time for more control.


Installation Ubuntu 20.04:

1. Buy sendy from here: Sendy
2. Install software on lightsail server:

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install apache2 -y

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt install php8.0 php8.0-{fpm,mysql,curl,gd,mbstring,mysql,xml,mcrypt,zip,ldap} libapache2-mod-php8.0 -y
sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif
sudo systemctl reload apache2
sudo a2enconf php8.0-fpm
sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo a2dismod php8.0
sudo systemctl enable php8.0-fpm
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo service apache2 restart; sudo service php8.0-fpm restart

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo systemctl start mysql.service

sudo mysql
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';
CREATE DATABASE sendy COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;
exit

You need to create a user for the `sendy` database too: How To Create a New User and Grant Permissions in MySQL | DigitalOcean

IMPORTANT: Make sure to grant full priveleges of the user to the `sendy` database

3. Download and install sendy (you get all the info in the email they send after you purchase it)
Put the downloaded files in the /var/www/html folder

4. Follow the instruction from the get started guide: Get Started with Sendy

5. Possible issues

There was an issue with the initial tests.
The emails always went to spam, and were marked as:

Be careful with this message
The sender hasn't authenticated this message so Gmail can't verify that it actually came from them. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information.

The problem was with the DMARC validation.
While the DKIM and the SPF validation were correct and handled by default by the AWS SMTP server, the DMARC was not.
An additional setting in AWS was required.
Not only that but other people had the same problem and no one had found a solution yet.
Check one of my answers here: DMARC fails using custom domain with Sendy, messages marked as spam

In a nutshell, when you create your verified identity, make sure to set DKIM signatures: Enabled
That fixes the DMARC validation issue, and emails arrive in inboxes perfectly.


NOTES:

1. You can go with nginx or a different PHP stack, doesnt matter much.
Most of the action is done on the server, so the webserver is of little concern.

2. I`ll be doing full tests of the capibilities of the Sendy software with a list of ~60k verified subscribed user emails.
I dont yet have any data on speed, effectivenes or reliability.

---

What prompted this was the suggestion from @Andy Black in this thread: IDEA - Computer Nerds - BREAK This Industry

Its a coincidence (or not) but I`m building a SaaS for email marketing.
The software I`m building is meant to address the Cons of software like Sendy, while keeping almost all of the Pros
PLUS it will address the cons of software like MailCheat(Chimp) with its high prices and unused features.

The story behind this is a bit long, but I`ll give the short version.
The bulk of my income still comes from trading my time for money so I`ve been heavily involved in building a charity platform in my own country Bulgaria (I can add links to it if anyone is interested)
We did great things with it and is currently the largest charity platform in my country receiving about 1 million USD in donations each month.

One of the problems, which remains unsolved is that we wanted to do email marketing campaigns to donators for any current campaign so we could kickstart it.
However, after more than 7 services, including MailCheat(Chimp), aweber, activecampaign, sendgrid, sendinblue, snov and I cant remember the rest, we couldnt find anything that we can use.
The problems ranged from validation issues, refusal to run campaigns, automatically stopping them, emails going to spam and/or not being opened, refusing to use the list that we had, insisting on adding external JS scripts to track events and so on.
We couldnt run a single campaign from start to finish for a whole year and we spent close to 10k USD for no results.

Finally we decided to solve our own problem by building a service that we really need and making it a SaaS so if anyone else wants to use it they can.
The initial thought was to make an integrated solution in the charity platform itself, but that was a stupid idea.
Same effort, no way to use it outside.

This happened naturally I consider it work as part of the charity platform, so I`m still busy with this as my main business idea ATM: EXECUTION - Starting a cosmetics brand [EXECUTION]

The plan is to make something simple at first and grow it overtime using user feedback and suggestions while making sure that we solve core problems from the start.
For example the payment model will be "Pay as you grow" as in, there will be no fixed monthly payment, you will NOT be paing to just have an email list hosted.
Instead you`ll pay only for the emails you send and any modules you use.
An example for a module would be the option for a subscription form.
You dont plan to use a subscription form on your site? No problem, you wont be paying for that.
You dont send any emails this month, no moduels active? You pay nothing and your account stays intact ready for use when you need it.

There will be a very easy way for users of the software to interact directly with development, request features and vote on requested features which will be the basis of the roadmap of the software.
This option to vote on suggestions and build the tools which the users actually want was inspired by @MJ DeMarco and @Dean Irwin

I`ll make a dedicated thread about this when the Beta is out.
However feel free to share you wants, needs, frustrations and problems that you have when it comes to email marketing.
I`d love to hear from the forum.

 

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[alexkuzmov]

So I got an update and some real data to share.

Here are a a few more Cons to Sendy

1. You cant send emails to a list larger than the daily limit for AWS, you cant even start the campaign.
So you are forced to split the email lists, even though you can limit the send rate to be below what you could possibly send in a single day.
Which brings me to the next con.

2. You cant set the send rate to be below 1 per second without tampering with the code.

Can the sending speed be set to less than 1 per second?

Due to an oversight on my part which caused a sudden spike in my bounce rate, Amazon SES disabled my account.

sendy.co

This is a common theme for the software.
There are solutions to things, but you have to know where and what to change in the code to make little things like this work.

3. You cant schedule a campaign for a time period, only the start date.

-------------------------------------------
We had more problem with the start, after a few test with smaller lists (3k in total sent) we got blocked by amazon.
IMPORTANT: Make sure to follow best practicies when sending your emails so you dont get your account pause by amazon.
All the rules for sending proper emails still apply (you cant send scam emails using any system, no matter how expensive or cheap)

After we got our account back and running, we changed the email texts based on suggestions from amazon and we started with larger campaigns.



Things are looking good so far.
The open rate is amazing!

We still need to figure out how to better manage the lists, but so far so good.

 

[alexkuzmov]

A little update on things.
I`m kind of a victim of success here.
The sendy system worked out so well, that we abandoned the plans of making our own SaaS service for sending emails.

Once configured, we started sending tens of thousands of emails per week and it all just works:



The open rate is superb, the clicks vary, but usually hit about 3-4%
Which is great, considering the weekly volume of emails sent.

So yea...