Who Knows about Email Marketing Software??

[JEdwards]

I am not really into IM at all, or the internet in any way, really. and sadly so are most of my customers. But I have come across a need I would like to see if I can fill for some of my regular customers.


Please excuse my ignorance in this area.


I am thinking of trying to offer a turn key email system specific to an industry. The email deal would have really cool professionally designed industry specific templates already loaded on them.


So say they are a pizza place, after loading their customer base, they can come in whenever they want, pick a template such as free pizza for being an old customer, Merry Christmas, etc. their info/logo would be filled in automatically, they press send.. Done, now even the small mom and pops could have cool looking emails.


Should I just go to elance and have this written, or is there an email system you suggest I can buy, add templates to and resell?


I am trying to figure out how to charge a monthly. Anyone doing this?

Or what would be the problems in doing this?


Thanks for any advice you can give.

 

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[Giles]

I am not really into IM at all, or the internet in any way, really. and sadly so are most of my customers. But I have come across a need I would like to see if I can fill for some of my regular customers.


Please excuse my ignorance in this area.


I am thinking of trying to offer a turn key email system specific to an industry. The email deal would have really cool professionally designed industry specific templates already loaded on them.


So say they are a pizza place, after loading their customer base, they can come in whenever they want, pick a template such as free pizza for being an old customer, Merry Christmas, etc. their info/logo would be filled in automatically, they press send.. Done, now even the small mom and pops could have cool looking emails.


Should I just go to elance and have this written, or is there an email system you suggest I can buy, add templates to and resell?


I am trying to figure out how to charge a monthly. Anyone doing this?

Or what would be the problems in doing this?


Thanks for any advice you can give.

I'm in the very early stages of starting a mass email provider. I wasn't going to include templates however.

I am currently a customer, paying $1200 per month to send emails, hence going into the industry myself. There is good money to be made if you go after the big accounts. 50,000+ subscribers. The smaller accounts can use places like MailCheat(Chimp), Aweber, iContact etc (I'm also paying $40ish per month at Aweber for only 600 subscribers)

Avoid Elance. You need to make sure your IP isn't blacklisted or all your emails will be put in Spam boxes.

An important thing to consider (at least for me) is that when I hit send, I want all subscribers to get the email within a few hours, not spread out over days. So you need variable computing power...

 

[PatrickP]

I think if either of you guys could offer a service which is not intentionally blocked by the major email services you could make a TON of money.

Yahoo has stated they are now blocking or immediately noting as SPAM emails which come from Aweber servers. Hot mail has said something similar with one of the other email sending services.

 

[FastNAwesome]

I am thinking of trying to offer a turn key email system specific to an industry. The email deal would have really cool professionally designed industry specific templates already loaded on them.


So say they are a pizza place, after loading their customer base, they can come in whenever they want, pick a template such as free pizza for being an old customer, Merry Christmas, etc. their info/logo would be filled in automatically, they press send.. Done, now even the small mom and pops could have cool looking emails.

I'm not quite sure whether you want just to provide them nice template they'd send on their own (that's not hard to do, just ask me). Or are you thinking a system, like Email Marketing Software & Email Marketing Services from AWeber or Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailCheat(Chimp) etc.

Now that one has a high barrier to entry, but that's good, right?

Should I just go to elance and have this written, or is there an email system you suggest I can buy, add templates to and resell?

I'd say elance no way for this kind of thing. It's too complex to trust with anyone but someone with proven experitse in that particular field. There are both open source (free) and paid systems you can get, so you'd be better off with one of those.

Popular free one: phplist.com : phpList : The world's most popular open source email campaign manager

Semi free-one: Mailing List Manager | Dada Mail | Easy To Use and Extendable

Paid one: LISTSERV mailing list software, email marketing software, email list hosting - L-Soft

I think for this business the most important thing would be once everything is up and running to have at your disposal skilled techies 24/7 - your employers, who will take care that everything goes well, and react immediately on any problems.

As for templates, that you can go get on elance, but make sure your templates look good on receiving end, HTML can sometimes break depending on receiver's email client/settings.

I am trying to figure out how to charge a monthly.

Well, just like other subscription services, correct? You can accept credit cards, paypal, wire whatever. I know my bank offers secure credit card processing.

Or what would be the problems in doing this?

Problems are many, which is exactly why most marketers don't think twice to pay for this service.
To not go into detailed talk here, (I can in some follow up posts) :

- Deliverability rate - how many of what you send out reaches inboxes

- Spam complaints, IP blacklisting

- Laws, best practices, managing (un)subscriptions, FTC (check out point 7. The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business | BCP Business Center)

- API integration with 3rd party sites (not a problem really, but one of the complex things on TODO list) - integration with FB, twitter, various shopping carts.

I think if either of you guys could offer a service which is not intentionally blocked by the major email services you could make a TON of money.

I think I might actually have a solution for this.

@JackEdwards @Giles : Good luck guys, sounds pretty scary

That said, it would be cool to see you JV on this and kick some serious a$$

 

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[healthstatus]

I use Imnica Mail - Email Marketing Service - Email Marketing Solved for one reason, they let me import my 40,000 subscribers without sending another permission email. They have some stock templates, but with their editor it is VERY easy to create a mailing from an HTML page, they also track clicks, opens and the like and will integrate with Google Analytics if you need that.

 

[PatrickP]

I had never heard of Imnica Mail

Great source it seems and super cheap. Nice post HS!

 

[JEdwards]

Thanks for the responses. Will look into the advice and sites posted.

Aweber is close, but I would want it to be all industry specific.

So I guess I need to figure out who can make that deal work.

 

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[PatrickP]

Maybe work with Yahoo, hotmail etc so they wont flag your servers and automatically put the emails in the SPAM folder?

For me if a service could guarantee that I would sign up for it for sure.

 

[Kak]

I use Vertical Response because I only have a little over 100 on my customer list. I can pay per mailing and not worry about monthly fees until my list hits larger numbers.

I use email marketing to retain customers and help with referrals, not to sell affiliates or anything.

 

[TK1]

Maybe work with Yahoo, hotmail etc so they wont flag your servers and automatically put the emails in the SPAM folder?

For me if a service could guarantee that I would sign up for it for sure.

try this one:

Newsletter Software SuperMailer to create and send newsletters or create and personalized bulk emails

excellent results, almost no mails get flagged, but it depends on the subject line and the content of your mails A LOT, too

 

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[LightHouse]

Jack, the ideal thing is to find a webdev COMPANY (no elance bullshit) to write the code to create the templates and front end, and integrate the sending with an already major provider. Reason being is becoming a list serving company is very tough and a lot of work. Dealing with IP and deliverable issues plus server resources to serve customers emails to their lists is tough titties.

 

[theBiz]

what... Jack i think this is a terrible idea unless you charge your clients really good money for it.. what about MailCheat(Chimp).com and other sites like this... i pay a few bucks a month, i have tons of templates and its really easy to use... Maybe i am missing something but why would you do this? I think it will cost alot of money to replicate all the good extremely cheap resources out there now in which most will eventually find out about...


And no do not go to elance... just buy something already created.

http://www.google.com/search?q=white+label+email+software&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a

 

[Kak]

Well i have tried Vertical Response, constant comtact, campaigner, aweber and mail chimp. I am currently usimg MailCheat(Chimp) and i love the RSS campaigns. All i have to do is post blogs and once a week the chimp makes and sends a compilation email and updates the social media to the new newsletter. I LOVE IT.

 

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[LightHouse]

To follow up on my post, i just got an email today that was sent through something like i was mentioning...

SMTP Relay Server: App and Transactional Email Delivery by SendGrid | Sendgrid

this is a cloud service that handles all the shit you don't want to have to deal with. This may work for you Jack.

 

[Brander]

There are industry specific email marketing solutions out there, one that comes to mind is campaignmonitor.com

Most have industry specific templates. A tip: if you send email, don't sign up for the most popular provider - every dick and harry hammers their IP reputation daily. I have my own servers and solution, so maybe Jack has given me an idea. PM me Jack and we can maybe take this thing to the masses.

For anyone with larger lists frustrated with Aweber, maybe a personalised solution like Bronto might help.

 

[JasonR]

We use Constant Contact here, and it works pretty well. Thought about using MailCheat(Chimp). We have about 60,000 contacts. We are also thinking about using Listrak once our new website is built.

There is a lot of competition in this area. What will you offer that the others don't?

 

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