Email Marketing - What Do You Use?
April 7 2008, 6:46pm
To those who are registered with OSF and have opted-in to the RecipeMail feature, you’ll have started getting weekly emails in your inbox every Monday of the week’s most popular recipes on the site, complete with little pics. How nice!
They look something like this:
This is a great way for those members who aren’t necessarily contributors to keep in touch with the awesome content that goes on the site. Right now this feature is for registered members only as for cost reasons I wanted to just focus on the core audience. Now, with my move to a different mass mail service provider, my costs have been cut enough to potentially allow even non-registered users to opt-in to the RecipeMail feature.
To handle the bulk mailout server load and management of subscribers, I use a 3rd party solution which I pay for. It would probably be possible to build something myself, but building a really bullet-proof solution for mass mailing requires a lot of legwork (the scalability factor, all that boring functionality such as list importing, subscribing and unsubscribing on a per-list basis, writing all the reporting functionality so I can see who is bouncing, who is opening, who is clicking etc) a lot of legal knowhow and a lot of anti-spam / anti-abuse expertise that frankly, I’d rather leave to pioneers in the field who make it their core competency to deal with these things every day, rather than for me to waste time trying to do it all myself.
Previously, I used CampaignMonitor. I think they have an excellent, polished product. But their pricing system makes scaling your email marketing efforts quite cost-prohibitive. With a list of say, 5000 members and a weekly mailout, I’d be looking at a monthly cost of $220. It’s not a whole lot of money in the grand scheme of things because I believe it is money well-spent on communication; the RecipeMail is a great way for the site to give something to those users who don’t visit much and don’t contribute, without them even having to do anything - every week they just get a list of the top recipes for that week. It’s going to be interesting if we start seeing seasonal trends in the recipes too as the weeks go on. Anyway I digress; whilst $220 a month is a price I was prepared to pay for now, with CampaignMonitor’s per-recipient, per-mailout cost model, it would quickly become prohibitively expensive to mail out to larger numbers with any kind of frequency - and OSF is not the only product I manage where I use mailouts as a way of interacting with members.
Then recently I stumbled upon a competing service, MailChimp. At its core, MailChimp provides almost the exact same basic functionality as CampaignMonitor. The key difference is their pricing model, which is based on the amount of subscribers you manage (as a sum of all your various lists). For me, I sit in their $50 a month plan at the moment, and for that I am allowed to send out as many mails as I want (within reason of course - spammers will be quickly smited. I plan to send with no more frequency than weekly). In other words, a single mailout at CampaignMonitor costs me the same as a whole month’s worth of service at MailChimp.
I was initially skeptical about this vast difference in cost - there has to be a catch, right? But it seems not, as MailChimp has quite an impressive client list of people and companies using the service, most of them very satisfied as can be seen in their testimonials section. I used the service to send a test campaign to myself today and was pleased with the results.
Both have the core features I need to send my campaigns. They allow me to import lists, import an HTML formatted campaign (mine is created on-the-fly by OSF) and send them to the list either immediately or by scheduling. Both provide reporting on open rates, bounces etc. Both also feature a simple API, which I use to sync up my lists whenever someone subscribes or unsubscribes from OSF (recipients can also unsubscribe directly in the mail). The service’s differences, based on my admittedly limited usage of MailChimp are as follows, based on my needs (I haven’t mentioned advantages or disadvantages that don’t affect me):
Campaign Monitor
- FOR: Elegant, uncluttered interface.
- FOR: Import campaign via url
- FOR: Visual reporting with pie charts and graphs
- FOR: Images in your url-imported campaign are automatically saved to CampaignMonitor’s server and served from there in the final campaign email, which I like (seems more reliable that way, plus less load on my server)
- FOR: Very cool cross-browser / cross-client tools that show you what your campaign will look like in an array of different mail clients.
- AGAINST: the per-recipient, per-mailout pricing plan
- AGAINST: tiny thing, but I think they might be storing passwords in cleartext because when you forget your password it actually sends you your current password by mail, rather than resetting it.
MailChimp
- FOR: Very cool A/B testing tools so you can measure the relative effectiveness of different Subject lines etc on the same campaign.
- FOR: At first glance, a stricter policy regarding abuse, which is better for everyone.
- FOR: Their flat-rate monthly pricing plan, based on your total amount of subscribers.
- AGAINST: Slightly clunkier interface (but I recognise that the actual process of creating, managing and sending a campaign is a pretty difficult one to guide a user through)
- AGAINST: Assumes that you want to use their online tools to design and create your campaign. Importing of a pre-made campaign (which is what I do) is a non-default option. Being picky, it’s just one more click that I’d rather skip.
I wouldn’t even have known about MailChimp if it weren’t for a cursory mention on Techcrunch recently (I can’t even find where it was linked now) - perhaps there is even another service out there that is even better?
My Questions to you…
What are you using for your mailouts, if anything?
Have I missed something huge in comparing these two services? From my experiences as a basic user, there really isn’t much to differentiate them other than price - and certainly the features that do differentiate the services are non-critical ones that I consider just nice extras to the core functionality of reliably handling my mailouts and subscribers. How then is a service such as Campaign Monitor supposed to compete against one like MailChimp, which offers the same core functionality at a vastly lower cost? We’re not even talking incrementally lower - their entire pricing model is different. I really like Campaign Monitor (and actually have a lot of respect for Freshview, the company who makes it) but I wonder if long term there are going to be more users like me switching to MailChimp if either the pricing model doesn’t change or they don’t do more to highlight the functional benefits of using them over the cheaper service.
Your thoughts.
