How do you send news letters - Saas or Desktop Software

[ZenMasta]

Hey guys,
I'm not really sure where to post this. Sorry if its the wrong forum.

I'm thinking about doing a regular news letter/advertising campaign to our customers. We've had a commerce site for quite sometime but never had a way to manage an email list and stuff. This will be our first attempt at bulk mailing of any kind.

I'm trying to decide if I want to use a service like icontact or find software that will do all those same features. Does anyone here use desktop software instead of SaaS for email marketing, if so which one. I'm especially interested if you have first hand experience.

SaaS companies claim to have good report with ISPs to help avoid you being blacklisted or something. So I just wonder how true this is.

We have a pretty small list, less than 10,000 I'm pretty sure and I'm aiming to start with a monthly wave to all, and then after user feedback, start customizing based on preferences/opt out etc.


I really appreciate all advice on this subject. We'd like to start a campaign soon.

[srandall]

Serach on openemm. It's what I would use.

[ZenMasta]

I'll check that one out but it looks stagnant. No news/updates in almost a year. The forums seem slow too.

What about the saas vs do it yourself model and how the saas providers claim that you will be marked as a spammer if you do it instead of them.

[srandall]

No idea, I'm not a mailer. If it's a small mailing list then the Saas solution seems excessive. You have to weigh risk.

[raj]

unless you have a good SNAT (if behind firewall) , RDNS, DOMAINKEYS, DKIM and also postmaster loop setup with aol, hotmail, yahoo and gmail.
sending any kind of news-letter or valid bulk mail will either be sent to JUNK or your ip will be blocked (no regular mail will even go to them) with 0 answers form all the above providers.

* 10,000 is no way near small..yahoo will ban you even with 100 emails or hotmail with 500 or less coming from SAME IP with SIMILAR contenet

so unless you up to task for all that..go with hosted mailing SaaS


Raj

[ZenMasta]

Thanks Raj, helps to know what's all really involved in that process. Clearly saas is what I need to use then.

BTW, I just wanted to add though. Prior to writing this topic I had demo'd one of the saas companies and sent a message to hotmail gmail and yahoo. On some of the acounts it went to inbox but one of the yahoos I sent to went to spam/junk. So I guess I'll have to figure that out with the saas provider and how to restructure my email content.