Email Marketing

I spent some of yesterday looking for email marketing solutions for this blog. It has been some time since I last investigated the available offerings for email marketing and I was expecting there to be several freely available solutions to try.

There are various options that you can freely use, but I had some specific requirements that most of them didn’t meet, thus limiting the choices.

Requirements

I had some fairly simple requirements that had to be met.

• It must easily integrate with the blog.
• It must be able to format the email in HTML.
• It must have autoresponder functionality.
• Users must be able to subscribe directly from the blog.
• User data can be exported for use in external programs, such as in CSV format for Excel.
• The ability to direct to specific landing pages.
• Confirmation email.
• The ability to customize the email layout.
• The ability to broadcast to multiple users.
• There should be some reporting functionality with various statistics and information.
• Reliable email delivery.
• Minimal impact on website.
• Preferably free.

These requirements are by no means exhaustive, but they are fairly essential for effective email marketing. Armed with this list, I went searching for available tools that could meet these requirements.

I can say that I was surprised by the lack of options in this market. After much searching, I came up with the following options:

• shiftthis WordPress plugin. - looks reasonable, but costs $30 to purchase.
• cforms II - quite easy to integrate, but lacks functionailty.
• PHPList Form WordPress Integration plugin - meets many of the requirements, but requires installation and management of separate application.
• Zookoda - meets nearly all of the requirements.
• Aweber - The best of the lot by a far way, but is not free.

Out of the above selection, I chose to use Zookoda, primarily because it met most of the requirements while also being free. Zookoda has many good features, but it appears to be quite neglected since IZEA (PayPerPost) purchased it in April 2007 and does not seem to have had any development since the last time I tried it.

TechCrunch even forecast it going to the deadpool in December 2007, after IZEA suspended the service due to what it called excessive spamming.

The service is functioning again at the moment, but it does appear to be heavily neglected, and slightly old now, which is a pity, as it could be a very valuable service in IZEA’s collection.

Because of this neglect, and the increased features offered, I will probably switch to Aweber at some stage in the future, as it does provide the most complete solution.