Newsletters, what are you using?

[Steve Bullman]

Looking at options for sending out newsletters. In the past I have just done it directly through the admin panel, being careful to only send 1000 at a time to minimise the risk of being blacklisted. Now I have taken someone on who is going to be managing regular email marketing campaigns monthly, or perhaps even weekly to a subscription base of 30,000. I would like to know what software everyone is using to do this. I have obviously looked at the obvious ones like mail chimp and active campaign, but the prices are going to stack up pretty damm quickly using those.

I see invision already has send grid set up for use, but that doesn't look cheap either. Also if I understand it correctly, using that will mean forum notification emails etc will go through that also, eating into my valuable quota.

I do have some budget on this but obviously want to do it the most cost efficient way. If this means sending it through invision still with a workaround to avoided being blacklisted that would obviously be great. Particularly if the email campaign (opens, click throughs etc) can be tracked.

Hope to get some good replies from you guys. Thanks.

[Square Wheels]

I installed https://www.mailwizz.com/ on my server and send about 1000 email a day.  It works well and it's affordable.

[Daniel F]

I have some good experiance with Mailcoach, which is also a self hosted script https://spatie.be/products/mailcoach

 

[Steve Bullman]

32 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

I have some good experiance with Mailcoach, which is also a self hosted script https://spatie.be/products/mailcoach

 

So my only expense with that would be the initial outlay for the software? Does this have systems in place to prevent blacklisting? Do you manually have to update the subscription list or have you integrated it with IPS?

1 hour ago, Square Wheels said:

I installed https://www.mailwizz.com/ on my server and send about 1000 email a day.  It works well and it's affordable.

Thank you. More or less same questions about this as I made above to Daniel

[Square Wheels]

Mail Wizz is not integrated.  I created a form for users to sign up.  I use double opt in.  https://www.pathlabtalk.com/forum/index.php?/pathlabtalk-newsletters/

There is a modest one time cost of 69 USD, then a small cost for updates.

It does manage bounces.

[Daniel F]

Apologie the delay,

On 6/24/2021 at 2:10 PM, Steve Bullman said:

So my only expense with that would be the initial outlay for the software? Does this have systems in place to prevent blacklisting? Do you manually have to update the subscription list or have you integrated it with IPS?

You'll also need an email provider and a bridge between your community and the app!

It's an external app, providing the necessary features and UI to manage newsletters (and much more) . You'll still have to use an email provider. While they also support SMTP out of the box I wouldn't recommend it. https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-mailcoach/v4/configuring-mail-providers/introduction

So to sum it up: It's probably not exactly what you're searching:) It's just the admin backend to create and manage stuff, which is really amazing and working well for my own needs ( drip campaigns, newsletters, etc..) , but you'll still need a proper mail provider AND if you want to use it in combination with your IPS, you'll need a custom plugin to connect these 2 apps.

Hence you're not a developer, I would probably strongly advice to NOT use this solution;) 
One could of course use IPS for this or create an own app similar to this, but I prefered the one time purchase to get all the automation features https://mailcoach.app/automation, especially because it was much cheaper a while ago)

[Steve Bullman]

36 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

Apologie the delay,

You'll also need an email provider and a bridge between your community and the app!

It's an external app, providing the necessary features and UI to manage newsletters (and much more) . You'll still have to use an email provider. While they also support SMTP out of the box I wouldn't recommend it. https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-mailcoach/v4/configuring-mail-providers/introduction

So to sum it up: It's probably not exactly what you're searching:) It's just the admin backend to create and manage stuff, which is really amazing and working well for my own needs ( drip campaigns, newsletters, etc..) , but you'll still need a proper mail provider AND if you want to use it in combination with your IPS, you'll need a custom plugin to connect these 2 apps.

Hence you're not a developer, I would probably strongly advice to NOT use this solution;) 
One could of course use IPS for this or create an own app similar to this, but I prefered the one time purchase to get all the automation features https://mailcoach.app/automation, especially because it was much cheaper a while ago)

Thanks Daniel, Yep you are probably right its not going to serve my needs if sendgrid or the like is still required. Thanks for the response.