My research into Commercial Email Marketing Providers

I did some research a couple months ago into newsletter services for our DSWP monthly newsletter.  There are a number of plugins, and most combine the newsletter recipient info with the WordPress user registration tables.  In my case, I needed to also combine the sign-up form from the Members Only site.  And all that information is only for the sign-up form!!  Then we have to put this data into an emailing program.  The sites that I have listed below are the most popular mass-emailing services.  Also, they are the ‘easiest to use’ although I have not tested many of them.

As a sidenote, I skipped all these services, and went with an open-source newsletter service.  After this table, is an explanation of our current newsletter set up.

These are simply the top newsletter services, with their limitations and listed prices:

Up until October this blog was open to user registrations.  Within our site alone, a user could potentially have three passwords to remember.   To streamline things, I have disabled registration on this blog – comments are still open but for our purposes I see no need for registration at all.  This left us with two newsletter sign ups – the Members Site, and the DSWP site.  Both native software packages have poorly formed options for sending out newsletters.  So I started looking at commercial services to speed up the process.

Obviously in a start-up, cost is a big factor, so that ruled out the commercial options.  The options remaining were yet MORE programs – albeit free ones.  A quick look around the hosting forums turned up a favorite – by a landslide actually – phplist.  And well, it is time consuming to review various software packages and the learning curve that comes with each.  So I searched the WordPress plugin repository to see if there was a little helper plugin available.  And, voila!  We have our solution: a mix of phplist (free) plus a WordPress plugin (also free).

Features:

• one registration form – for the member site and/or newsletter
• accessible signups for Members & Non-members
• a good program to edit and send newsletters (our configuration requires html knowledge)
• a WordPress plugin to make it all easier
• FREE
• all the data is export-able in csv format

1) requires a monthly sync between all the signups

2) does NOT use the tables in the Members Site (not quite that integrated)

3) newsletter admin panel is not pretty to look at (and I actually do consider that a big draw-back)

All in all, I’m one happy geek-girl.