MailChimp Alternative

[JJWinst]

Who does everyone use for their email marketing?

I am currently very close to the 2000 subscriber point in which I will have to start paying £20.00 a month to continue with. Are there any better alternatives?

 

[Shopclicks]

Have a look at Vertical Response. I use them and find their pricing very competitive.

If you use your emails effectively, it's a small price to pay to get your message out to more than 2000 interested subscribers.

 

[RakeMark]

From a money point of view £20.00 a month sounds very reasonable if the software is doing what you want it to do, the support is first rate and so on. How much can you hope to save? If you cut your costs by half you only save a tenner a month and then you've got the hassle if moving and so on.

I can't see why you would move on a purely financial basis.

 

[8420PR]

I think MailChimp is one of the best email marketing tools out there, for the price-point.

If you really want to reduce the cost, you could try a self-hosted software such as sendy.co, using Amazon SES to send the emails. It's cheap and effective, but you lose a lot of the functionality (especially ecommerce integration) you may be used to having from MailChimp.

 

[jamesbaldock]

Why not set up your own system using some free software? That's what we do. It's all run online and is really easy. There also aren't any restrictions like MailChimp e.g. people can subscribe with info@ and other generic e-mail addresses.

It's worth looking into and really easy to manage.

Do get in touch if you need any help with this. Always happy to help.

 

[JordanC26]

Hi,

I've found CampaignMonitor to be pretty useful. Feature Rich and many Email Templates if needed. Lots of analytic tools too.

 

[antropy]

MailChimp is a pretty good option and £20/month isn't a lot but startups do need to keep costs as low as possible within reason.

If you're relatively technical you could look at: https://www.phplist.com/ but you'd need a server to run it on and that wouldn't be free.

Or you could use this extension for Thunderbird: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/

But personally, I'd just stick with MailChimp because of the reporting and being able to use their servers which ensure high delivery rates.

Just make sure you get your £20 worth by coming up with really good campaigns and intelligently sending them to the customers who are likely to be most interested based on their previous order history and any other data you have about them.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Mailchimp is pretty good, but, as suggested, you could use PHPlist and them Mandrill, which is Mailchimps SMTP server (i.e. post office), which gives you unlimited users (on phplist) and 12000 free emails a month, then $0.20/k after.

If using Joomla, WP or other systems, you could also use various components/plugins to manage your list (as I do), which really makes life easy.

BTW, I am sending several hundred thousand emails a month to my lists using this setup!

 

[zimone]

From a money point of view £20.00 a month sounds very reasonable if the software is doing what you want it to do, the support is first rate and so on. How much can you hope to save? If you cut your costs by half you only save a tenner a month and then you've got the hassle if moving and so on.

I can't see why you would move on a purely financial basis.

I would agree that making the decision solely on a financial basis s not advisable as mentioned above. Are you happy with the service you are receiving? Do you get support from mil chimp? I am not sure what your line of business is but with 2000 subscribers you should easily be able to cover the cost if you utilise your list

 

[Matt Thorpe]

I would stick with Mailchimp because they are low-cost and are an approved email broadcaster.

A key part of sending email is about using systems that are white-listed by the ESPs such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Mail chimp has an excellent sender score and integrated with many e-commerce platforms.

Campaign Monitor is ok but a bit clunky. Mail Chimp all the way for me. Quick, simple, delivery is excellent and it's all low cost.

Another tip, if you are worried about cost, is to cull your sending list. If you have a list of 2000 people then see who hasn't opened in the last 6 or 12 months. If they haven't opened then the chances are that they are not interested or you are going into their spam folder. You should send a reminder email with an offer to try to re-activate them. If that doesn't work then remove them.

It's not the size of your list that counts but the quality. The responsive your list is the better the results.

 

[John_Adams]

I've used a few and mailchimp always wins out for me. Not sure how big your list is, but you may get a fall in deliverability if you change ESPs.