According to internet marketers, the email list is still what you should look to grow fast if you want to make any money online. For non-business people, it is a great way to spread ideas and contact many people at once.
I recently encountered problems with a client’s email list, some emails are not sent, so I’ve been looking for new ways to manage their newsletter. In the following article I share some of the popular options you get to technically manage your newsletter.
Open-source solutions
Whenever I start a new project or need some software to perform some tasks, I always take a look at what’s available in the open-source world. In our case, there are some good email list systems available, so you should check them out.
PHPlist
To be very honest, PHPlist is the software we are looking to replace for my client. Why recommending it on top of this article then? Because I still feel that this software is totally worth it.
In our case, the only issue is about email sending getting blocked at the end of the process. It might be a setup issue or some limitations due to our webhost (shared), I didn’t figure it out yet.
However, if you are willing to do a bit of setup, PHPlist will work fine most of the time. Its interface is not very user friendly, but it’s fairly easy to write messages and send them. It has a templating system and provides some insightful statistics about the emails you sent.
If you want to use PHPlist but don’t feel confident installing it and setting it up, you can take a look at their (paid) hosted version.
Pommo
Pommo is the other famous open source mailing list software. It is easy to install and the interface is much more intuitive than PHPlist’s interface.
I never tested it on big lists, but my short experience with Pommo was excellent. You can see a list of features here, one of the key features is the ability to send messages to a subset of subscribers.
WordPress plugins
If your site is powered by WordPress, you may want to have your newsletter system managed from the same place as your blog. There are some good plugins and systems to install to create a newsletter in WordPress.
Email newsletter using WordPress + Feedburner (not a plugin)
Not a plugin, but an excellent tutorial on how to create a simple newsletter by combining the flexibility of WordPress’ categories and feeds with the email feature of Feedburner. It is a quite simple tutorial to create a good newsletter with stats.
WP Autoresponder
This is a good solution if you want to set up a free, quick newsletter system that is linked to your WordPress blog. The plugin is simple to install and performs most tasks that average users will want. However it doesn’t seem to provide statistics. The plugin is free, but you must give your email address in order to download it.
MeeNews
Not free, but a professional solution if you are looking to integrate a newsletter to your WordPress blog. The setup is easy and requires no programming knowledge. A strong emphasis is put on the design of the interface that blends into WordPress, as well as the possibility to create nice looking templates easily.
MeeNews is priced according to a freemium model, with a Commercial version at €55 and a Premium version at €185.
Newsletter services (paid)
If you don’t want to bother with any of the technicalities of sending mass emails, the following services are for you. These newsletter apps will let you focus on the content and style of your newsletter without having to worry about how it works.
MailChimp
With tons of features like RSS to email, advanced stats with Google Analytics integration, a wide selection of templates, and much more, MailChimp is a great tool that comes at a cheap monthly price.
AWeber
AWeber is the weapon of choice of many famous bloggers and marketers. It offers autoresponders, subscribers segmentation, email tracking, and much more than what you’d expect from such a servic
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor gets pretty much the same features as its competitors, except for one that is very interesting for designers and freelancers in general: you can rebrand it and resell it as your own product.
About the Author
Mirko Humbert
Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.