Is Feedburner email ad-free?

Does Feedburner email enable all the customization Feedblitz provides?

(Feedburner and Feedblitz are associated/integrated, but Feedburner email is different.)

Are you sure PHPlist doesn’t already do everything, if you know how to use it? If not, do you know if PHPlist is planning a release with any missing features?

Thanks,
New to mailing lists,
Jonathon
(Testing Wordpress & TikiWiki)

…_/) Happy Sailing. — Paul

http://www.eyepin.com/en/eyepin_trial_account

best,
Lia

I used to use Constant Contact, which worked fine. However I now use zookoda which I’ve generally found to work very well (I manage 2 small newsletters). It’s free, has tracking capabilities and broadcasts can be set up one at a time or as recurring activities. I’ve only had one time where there was a delay of 12 hours after I scheduled a post to run for subscribers to receive it (Still not sure what happened). My only other caveat would be to see if there are any warm bodies at zookoda in case you need support. Peace.

Cost is reasonable – $19.95/mo for 10,000 subscribers & $9.95/mo each additional 10,000. Price breaks for paying quarterly, semi and yearly. They’re adding new features more often now. They may not have all the bells and whistle of other services, like a huge database of HTML templates, but what they do they do well.

I’ve setup dozens of clients with Aweber and they all have been very happy.

Aweber is the best and most perfect one. I have been using it for a long time. It is the most professional email list and newsletter manager I have ever seen.

You can also add your weblog feed to it and it sends the updates to the subscribers automatically:
http://www.aweber.com
It is also so affordable. Just $19 per month for less than 10,000 subscribers.

Best regards,
Vahid

To jd who recommended the ShiftThis.net wordpress plugin…

I recommends uploading your CSV file in batches of 100. I am guessing this is going to be a tad slow for the 15,000 he’s talking about!

To add to the general coversation, I have to agree that deliverability is a key issues. To this end you want to go with a supplier that can prove their worth here.

Ask to see the proof of their deliverability rates with hotmail, for example… that’s a notoriously tricky one.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you have to be careful to go through a checklist at server setup to make sure you get it all right:

1. Reverse IP lookup has to work.
2. SPF entry must be in your zone file and must be correct.
3. The IP address you have has to be clean from the past sins of someone else (and has to be static).
4. Your server better not be creating any mal-formed headers or dodgy HTML.

That’s just for starters. It doesn’t take much to get just one ISP or someone else upset, who stick you on an ORB or RBL database somewhere, and hey presto, suddenly no-one wants your emails.

Er yes, speaking from experience. A completely innocent setup mistake cost me a month of 20% deliverability rates, or there abouts, because some trigger-happy postmaster added my IP to spam database.

Finally, to ensure maximum deliverability, I have an associate looking into “bonded sender” services. I don’t know much about it, but if you’re making a lot of money from your list, you’d want to look into it.

All in the name of getting into everyone’s inboxes!

- Alister

Best, Deb

basically I think I’ve outgrown it both in terms of the size of my list and what they can handle and features. It’s served me very well but I think I need to upgrade to a paid service that can guarantee slightly better results.

Again the two big sells are one fee and your done, you install on your site and they even do that for you. You get full source code so it is fully customizable. It has all the bells and whistles including autoresponders, email throttling, templates, custom forms, text/html emails, reporting. Best of all it is actively developed software and they help you with support on everything.

If you dont mind me asking,whats wrong with zadooka?I personally use feedburner newsletter which is completely free and very functional for my needs.

It allows me to create customized messages using predifined fields
(like “Hello !!FIRST_NAME!! wish you have a happy new year…”)

You can create several distribution lists,
you can have drafts, templates, custom fields,
You can have groups to send, black lists and so on…

you can even import / export contacts.

Well, automating the import task of my contact info from a DB to the app requieres a little bit of geekdom; but you can do it manually for the worst case

I haven’t tried a web service (I did create one for one of my clients though)

However, imho groupmail is a better desktop app than its web-based counterparts.

Dan, are you not happy with your current newsletter company?

For us, deliverability is by far the biggest factor in choosing an email host, and that’s really the main reason we went with them. Their support is also very friendly and helpful.

They also have RSS to email feature which we prefer to the FeedBlitz / Feedburner options since you have the ability to actually email that list yourself… not just sending them the blog posts by email.

The issue you’ll likely have is getting your current list imported… Aweber will only import your list if you can prove they double-opted-in.

If that’s a deal breaker but you still want to focus on the big players to get good email deliverability, look at http://www.ConstantContact.com or http://www.GetResponse.com.

Constant Contact will import a well documented single opted-in list, and Get Response will similarly work with you if you have some documentation about how you aquired your subscribers (read: didn’t purchase the list). Send each one an email and ask about your specific case.

We’ve used each of those services but ended up mainly with Aweber – even though we weren’t able to import our list of nearly 50k subscribers with them. Yes, ouch indeed. :-)

Another option is to import your list wherever you can, and go with Aweber to build your list going forward… just a thought.

Feel free to email me if you have questions, etc. on how these compare in more detail.

Good luck with it!
Dan

I just posted comment over at ProBlogger, Darren’s looking for an email newsletter service. We use Ezine Director and have been happy with it. There’s lots of other suggestions in the comments to Darren’s post. I’m curious to see what……