A question I’m often asked is “can you recommend a solution for sending email newsletters?” simpleContact helps you collect permission to email people via its contact form opt-in and subscribe form, but once you have a mailing list you’ll want to start reaching out to people.
This is the next step in a marketing process, which I consider to be outside the scope of simpleContact. I firmly believe that a tool should know its job and do it well rather than try to do everything and do it poorly. There are many reasons why a hosted solution is better in this case than self-hosted or a program on your PC.
My usual recommendation is Campaign Monitor and I stand by that. I have used it to successfully deliver campaigns and I have yet to see a compelling reason to switch to another system. That said, there are several other hosted systems on the market that are worthy of consideration and may be more suitable in your case.
Mailchimp has great design, a comprehensive feature-set and a refreshing sense of humour. It’s popular with web designers as well as companies as large as Canon and Intel. It’s about to get a lot more popular too, because this week they announced a new “Forever Free” pricing plan that is just too good to ignore.
Under this new plan, you can store up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails a month. This is a fantastic deal for anyone starting out in email marketing. You may take a long time to outgrow this plan, and you can send many campaigns in the meantime. As Mailchimp say:
This is perfect for small businesses and e-retailers, artists, bands, bloggers, non-profits, churches, and anyone just getting started in email marketing.
I look forward to seeing how the rest of the market responds.
