Need email marketing system setup advice

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ispy

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#151566 29-Aug-2014 09:51

Hi, we have a small biz promotional website and are slowly building up member numbers - advertising businesses and members. We would now like to send fortnigthly 'latest listings', locally filtered emails to all our members. Somethign along the lines of 'These are the latest listings by businesses that you follow; These are the latest listings in your area;'. Somethign similar to deal site regular emails.
The plan is continued growth so we would like a fully featured system (reports, stats), although it is not necessary right at this moment.
What is the best way to set this up - custom mail development within the system or integrate with a mail service? (what mail service would you recommend?)
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions :)

Regs

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Snowflake

#1117827 29-Aug-2014 11:33

sounds like a perfect description of a CRM system with integrated Email Marketing solution. might be out of your budget range right now, but Dynamics CRM Online plus ClickDimensions http://clickdimensions.com/ would be the ideal sort of solution.

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marpada

475 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1117843 29-Aug-2014 11:59

If you are looking for a SaaS solution, we use Sendgrid (https://sendgrid.com/) and are quite happy with it. There might be other alternatives like http://mailchimp.com/, but I haven't tried it myself.

MileHighKiwi

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#1117883 29-Aug-2014 12:23

You should check out Mail Chimp. Easy as to use, good basic reporting (and it can integrate with Google Analytics), and you can pre-purchase credits by credit card. Our emails cost around $0.01 to send. We also use a more sophisticated marketing automation platform for big multi-part campaigns but if you simply wabt to email your subscribers a newsletter, Mail Chimp is an excellent option.

Inphinity

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#1117887 29-Aug-2014 12:26

Mailchimp is really good for email marketing, imo. I'm not sure it has built-in filters for the localisation stuff you're after though.

jnimmo

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#1117893 29-Aug-2014 12:32

You could probably setup something with MailChimp using RSS
i.e. you would put the listings on a website under different categories/tags for the different regions

Create a Mailchimp list with a custom field for the different regions, then segments based on each of the regions.
Setup an RSS-driven campaign for each of the segments, which sucks up the entries from the RSS feed and inserts them into a scheduled fortnightly email

I haven't used that functionality yet on Mailchimp but seems like that would work OK if you could get an RSS feed of the items.

ispy

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1117945 29-Aug-2014 13:24

jnimmo: You could probably setup something with MailChimp using RSS
Create a Mailchimp list with a custom field for the different regions, then segments based on each of the regions.
Setup an RSS-driven campaign for each of the segments, which sucks up the entries from the RSS feed and inserts them into a scheduled fortnightly email

ispy

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1117946 29-Aug-2014 13:26

marpada: If you are looking for a SaaS solution, we use Sendgrid (https://sendgrid.com/) and are quite happy with it. There might be other alternatives like http://mailchimp.com/, but I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks :) We currently use Mailchimp for monthly newsletters with basic fields merged. The difficulty is our locality data is right down to suburb, and each member may have multiple locations, so there would be thousands of segments.
Sendgrid have replied with a potential solution, but it doesn't feel like it's the best fit? Do you use sendgrid with dynamic content for each user?

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jarledb

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#1118023 29-Aug-2014 16:18

It will include custom programming, but Mailchimp have a service called Mandrill that will hook into your custom system via REST API or SMTP.

See: http://mandrill.com/

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marpada

475 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1118028 29-Aug-2014 16:22

ispy:
marpada: If you are looking for a SaaS solution, we use Sendgrid (https://sendgrid.com/) and are quite happy with it. There might be other alternatives like http://mailchimp.com/, but I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks :) We currently use Mailchimp for monthly newsletters with basic fields merged. The difficulty is our locality data is right down to suburb, and each member may have multiple locations, so there would be thousands of segments.
Sendgrid have replied with a potential solution, but it doesn't feel like it's the best fit? Do you use sendgrid with dynamic content for each user?

We send personalised campaigns, but we generate the content using our home-grown solution and integrate it with Sendgrid.

itxtme

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#1118361 30-Aug-2014 09:13

If you dont want a CRM just a marketing solution then Sendy is a web app that you can run yourself. Integrates directly with AWS SES which is significantly cheaper per email send than say survey monkey.

It come with a couple of web templates so it looks pretty.

timmmay

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#1118381 30-Aug-2014 09:31

AWS SES (Amazon Web Service Simple Email Services) is a good option for the sending part. There are limits on new accounts. Another option in the SMTP space is AuthSMTP, which I used succesfully for years before moving to a more general email solution on fastmail.fm.