Guys, C'mon...?!
Why don’t you guys build your own, or integrate with some of the top email marketing solutions? We have all these “enhanced” features that integrate with other services, but the one that seems to be the most obvious is strangely missing. IPB community owners need a proper email marketing solution!
With all due respect, because I love your platform other than this issue..., I don’t get how you can offer a COMMUNITY platform with, so many brilliant ways to monetize… without a proper email marketing solution available to your community owners to use.
For that matter, why are you guys not sending out regular newsletters to your customers? That would seem to be evidence that you are totally missing the necessity for email marketing for any online community system, be it yours, or your customers. Peculiarly strange?
The bulk mail system is NOT a proper email marketing system. It has limited design capabilities. It has no metrics/stats. It caps your emails out to about 200-400 a day, if you have thousands of subscribers, this is entirely impractical. It offers no ability to make forms to capture sign-ups.
Do an integration with:
- www.campaignmonitor.com
- www.getresponse.com
- www.mailchimp.com
- www.mailpoet.com
( this is a plugin for wordpress that is SUPER light and simple. But it does everything anyone needs. It covers the basics. Something like this would be perfect ).
... or build your own.
Any email marketing system DOES NOT have to be fancy!... All we really need are the following features:
- A decent design interface.
- Metrics.
- The ability to send out thousands of emails in one send.
- Mailing Lists.
- The ability to make forms that can capture sign-ups in the HTML widgets that will then go straight into a mailing list.