Thread

For a client, I’m looking for a trustworthy but lowcost autoresponder/newsletter service provider that should be integrated into an EE site (which will not use the membership functions of of EE). The client doesn’t like a self-installed script, we are talking about <5.000 email addresses in multiple lists and different followup sequences (in part with attachments) and a monthly newsletter.

I’ve googled about aweber, icontact, constant contact and a few others and currently, aweber seems to get the most recommendations. But I wonder if anyone has any personal recommendation/experience to share?

Aweber seems to be the king of autoresponders, but I’ve read decent things about GetResponse as well.

From my iContact use, I don’t believe the autoresponder will do what you want (i.e., send out emails based on certain rules). I just think you can set emails to go out at regular intervals.

For straight-ahead email marketing, any of the Freshview products are awesome. MailChimp and Vertical Response are quite nice too.

ms,

Who did you end up using?  I have been using aWeber for a couple years, but I’m looking for a new provider.  I need something with an API and although aWeber keeps eluding to a future API they still don’t even have it in beta.

Solspace has created an extension for Constant Contact which would make everything easy, but they do not have an autoresponder.  Supposedly in the works, but they are hinting towards release near the end of the year.

We ended up using AWeber as well and it works very well in most scenarios, but we have encountered some difficulties with umlauts and language customization. An API would be great as well (but not needed in that particular project) and perhaps for a new project I’d look for another solution again. However, AWeber seems to be a very reasonable solution given that you could spend a heck of money for the same service somewhere else.

Markus

How do you handle signups?  A separate embedded form or there email parser?

How do you handle signups?  A separate embedded form or there email parser?

We copied (and slightly adjusted for design) the HTML code AWeber is generating - we didn’t want to use the JS code. The problem we ran into was that seemingly AWeber assumes the page containing the form is ISO-8859-1 coded whereas ours are UTF-8 coded. That normally is no problem with the mail address but can lead to wrongly encoded names (used in personalization) in the AWeber database - and a malformed GET data error on the thankyou page if you try to pass the subscription data back to EE. Maybe an iframe would be a solution but I hadn’t time to try and AWeber told us the foreign character sets are currently not officially supported and we could change subscription data manually.

Markus

I know this is an old thread, I’m just dropping this here as a possible solution for anyone else searching for ExpressionEngine + Autoresponders as I did.

I’ve been using ActiveCampaign for a while, which has both a nice API to work with, and some interesting site tracking that goes beyond email clicks. i.e. you can trigger emails based on visits or actions on certain pages as well as on previous email activity.

Given that most people’s interest here is in the websites rather than email, I thought it might be of interest.

aweber is the best choice