Thread

Ok Folks,

Here’s the dilly of a Pickle I’m in.
See, I’ve got this wonderful mail list and I have a nice email friendly html monthly mailing that we would do with a company called constant contact. Problem is the client wants to cut the 3rd party out of the picture and use EE mailing feature.

What I need is a way to send out this monster and get back some sort of report on how many times the email was read, how many bounce backs (Hard and Soft), etc.
Any help would be greatly appreciated; even a point in the right direction would be awesome!

Cheers,
—
- Lavi

What I need is a way to send out this monster and get back some sort of report on how many times the email was read, how many bounce backs (Hard and Soft), etc.

That is precisely the reason why you’ll want to leave that to the Pros. EE does not provide that level of feedback and control. The mailing list is, in fact, rather simple, and it would be a major job to implement such features.

If you are happy with Constand Contact, stay with them. I believe Solspace has a plugin to facilitate adding new users automatically.

It’s easy to say, “stay with Constant Contact”.  It’s hard to convince a client to do it when they’ve decided otherwise 😉 I haven’t really looked into it, but if it were me I’d try looking into some open source mailing lists to see if there’s anything that will accomplish what you’re looking for.  It would be easier (IMHO) to hook into a pre-built system that has the features you need than to build the thing from scratch.  In the end it could potentially be cheaper for your client to stick with CC than to have you build them a replacement system that does the same thing…

One other difficulty is that many web hosts don’t want you to do mass emailings through their web servers - definitely check on this before you start sending out large amounts of emails through a mailing list.

I’m not overly concerned with mas mailings from the site. It’s on our own co-lo server so it’s quite content 😊

Any ideas / suggestions on open source mailing lists??

Thanks for the insight, I knew I wasn’t crazy :ohh:

It was my initial instinct to stay with CC, seeing as how that’s what they do well. They do very good work over there, I don’t feel like a spammer so i can at least sleep at night, not worrying that someone will do me in…

So as awesome as it looks to post a reply to myself.
What’s the consensus on phplist.com? will it play nicely with EE??

I have used it on occasion, yes. It’s nice, although I never integrated it much with EE.

I use mailchimp (hosted) but Dada mail is a very low cost PHP solution that supports lists around 5,000-25,000 and is updated fairly often.

As an aside, mailchimp just redesigned with new reporting tools and the site is now totally amazing. You can pay per email or per month depending on your list size. The super nice form designer is all ajaxy and stuff (in a good way) and it’s got a super clean interface.

I guess it depends on what exactly you want to do - you could probably set it up along side EE with no need to integrate it at all and it would work fine.  I don’t imagine it would be too hard to build an extension that intercepted EE registrations and (when appropriate) put them into the phplist email list (or lists).

I don’t have any specific knowledge about it, but just grabbing data during a registration isn’t tough.

Definitely keep us posted on how it goes - I’ve got a client that needs a solid mailing list server and that one does look nice.

The list is at ~10,000 so mailchimp may be a good fit.

I think I’m going to end up on phplist though. Can’t beat the price 😊
I’m comfortable enough modding source. So I’m feeling very optimistic it’ll be a good match up. I’ll try to keep people posted on the details.

Any ideas on how to catch registration information anyone? Maybe I should start a new thread…

Any way this ‘ll be the last post till Monday.

Cheers!!

One of these hooks is probably what you’re looking for:

Member member register

or

Member member register start

or possibly

Member register validate members

I’m with Ingmar on this. Try and convince your client to go with people who do this stuff for a living. I presume that the client determination to move away from CC is not purely for financial reasons but also because of brand continuity i.e. not having CC logos on their site and in the emails etc? If that is the case I’d look at Campaign Monitor. In my opinion it’s a much superior service (and it’s cheaper, you only pay for the emails you actually send). It’s easy to seamlessly integrate with EE and it’s reporting tools are very extensive. You can also set up individual client logins to reporting mini sites.

Cheers

Dry

I know this post is old(er), but what did you end up doing with this?  I’m in the same boat and I’d really like to figure something out that is clean, easy to use and works well.  I have a few installs of phplist running for a few clients and although it is free, it’s pretty clunky and counter-intuitive.  I think the whole user interface is living in the 90’s and hard to teach clients that aren’t really tech-savvy to use.

I was hoping that the communicate tab would be sufficient to compose great looking HTML emails but I have to admit I’m pretty bummed with the fact that EE doesn’t have much by the way of a nice WYSIWYG editor.  My client will be sending out emails based on blog entries so I’m considering writing a plugin that can import bits from blogs and include them in an email blast… or has this been done?

Would love to hear how you solved your problem!

Thanks,

Mike

I use mailchimp (hosted) but Dada mail is a very low cost PHP solution that supports lists around 5,000-25,000 and is updated fairly often.

As an aside, mailchimp just redesigned with new reporting tools and the site is now totally amazing. You can pay per email or per month depending on your list size. The super nice form designer is all ajaxy and stuff (in a good way) and it’s got a super clean interface.

Totally agree with MailChimp. Use it on another site (non-EE) but am now looking at using it for my first EE site.

I’m not a programmer (other than html/css) but want to know if you’ve integrated MailChimp into EE or if you have it stand-alone?

Also have a look at Campaign Monitor, there’s an EE extension for it, and their API is well-documented.

Also have a look at Campaign Monitor, there’s an EE extension for it, and their API is well-documented.

Yep it looks good.

However, say I’ve got 1,000 people on my mailing list and I send out 4 emails a month the costs are as follows:

MailChimp - $30
Campaign Monitor - $60

If they had a monthly fee then I would be tempted to go with them.