Thread

I am looking at creating a html email newsletter for my members and for people who are not members of the site but filled out a form (paper form) to subscribe to a newsletter.  I have the mailing list module which might work ok for creating a list from people that submitted us their email address.  I am not sure what will happen if they eventually join the site?  Also I want these newsletters to reflect the site in appearance and layout via html.  Does the current EE emailer allow this?  If not, whats my best add-on option for this.  Prefer something free right now to play with.  Does anyone have something set up like this?  Its a common setup, so hopefully an easy setup.

Thanks
Matt

ConstantContact and SurveyMonkey both give you the ability to create and manage HTMl email campaigns.  The native mailing list function CAN do some of this, but not with the same level of flexibility and manageability.  SurveyMonkey in particular has an EE add-on available to sync your member list with the newsletter subscriber list.  Both have free to try options, at least for a short time.

Thanks for the info.  ConstantContact is going to be way to expensive for me.  Plus I really want something that is integrated with my EE memberships.  I am trying to look at SurveyMonkey but its site isn’t working at the moment.  So I guess there isn’t a decent add-on for this?

Sorry, rather than SurveyMonkey I really meant MailChimp.  How many members are you looking at?  ConstantContact is a terrific system because it’s a fixed cost based on the number of members rather than a per email send measure (which MailChimp also does now on monthly paid subscriptions).  I find MailChimp’s templates are a bit more slick looking and more configurable, but they’re also a little less wizard-like to manage.  Just comes down to preferences.

I’ve not heard of particularly full-featured add-ons for EE that handle the mailing itself.  That’s just not what EE is good at or meant for, but rather integrating EE with a separate full-featured email campaign system seems like the next best thing - and the add-ons that do this all do it to different degrees.  There’s a CampaignMonitor add-on as well that I’ve heard good things about, but I’ve not used it myself.

I think the number of subscribers is really going to determine what we look at.  We currently have over 1200 members of our site and we have booths set up at one or two expos almost every week this time of year.  We are going to start getting people to sign up for a newsletter there also.  So the number of subscribers would start at 1200+ and keep climbing and climbing from there.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that our shared server won’t handle that many mails anyway.  So I will need to look at a separate service.

THat’s one of the principle reasons I would only consider an outside service - then you’re not relying on your own server to process and send emails - ConstantContact, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, MyEmma - they all have email campaign systems as their core business, so you get much better server configuration, load balancing, etc. with such systems that take all the pressured off of your own system.  As for which system to use - it’s a matter of your pricing model preference balanced with the feature set each offers - and how well they can be integrated with EE, at least as a base level, just so your member lists stay synched up at the very least.

Thanks.  Syncing with my EE membership is my biggest concern.  But I guess I could run separate lists and just let my members subscribe and unsubscribe as they want.  Thanks for your help.  I will look into them all.

Looks like MailChimp is the winner so far.  Has a great free package and also a EE add-on.  Will be trying it out sometime.