Hello,

Would anyone be able to point me in the direction of a more capable Email Module for marketing and campaigning purposes? 

Something capable of tracking data?

I must say the Email Module that ships with EE 1.6.x leaves much to be desired.  Are we expected to outsource the requirements to a service such as MailChimp?

Anything in the works to develop a more robust Email Module for EE 2.0?

If I may ask, what system does EE itself use for its own email campaigns?

I look forward to your responses.

Thanks

We don’t run email campaigns.

There are plenty of third-party options to help you integrate a more robust email campaign system with ExpressionEngine:

For 2.0, there is FireMail

For 1.x, Solspace has an add-on to integrate EE and Constant Contact.

And there is SL Freshview to integrate with Campaign Monitor.

We used to run all of our email from an in-house Lyris server, but we were constantly struggling with our emails getting put on people’s spam lists. Yahoo was especially bad and I was often responding to clients with Yahoo addresses who kept asking me why they weren’t getting the email.

We switched to Mailchimp last year and it’s been awesome. Mailchimp (and Campain Monitor and Constant Contact) have already negotiated with the major ISPs to guarantee that the mail being sent from their servers isn’t spam, so the emails are on the major whitelists.

So there’s a huge benefit with going with an email service instead of sending out emails from your own server.

And don’t forget the SL Mailchimp extension either.

There’s also Champagne that integrates Campaign Monitor:
http://natural-logic.com/software/champagne/

They’re working on 2.0 I think ..