Email Marketing

07 Mar 2011

Email marketing can be a confusing thing for those not in the know - something we just figured out by going it alone. Most agencies tend to outsource their email marketing solutions - it is a lot more expensive, but does save a lot of time. There are, however, limitations to such solutions, including data protection and the retention of rights to use content.

These issues, eventually resulted in a client of ours asking us to use a own hosting based solution.

The Problem

Our client felt very strongly about the protection of their email contacts - they felt, rightly so, that by keeping their clients emails on their own account, fully secured, that they had more control over content and data compliance than outsourcing to a UK or US based company. Their concerns primarily arose from the recent Fine Gael website hacking incident.

The Solution

After looking into, literally, dozens of solutions, we eventually settled on phplist as being the best solution for their needs. To be honest, it was the only solution which held up well against all the different criteria required, including being well tested, as phplist say on their website "phplist is the world's most popular open source email campaign manager". This had us sold, especially when I asked a friend of mine from college, now with a business with a mailing list of over 5,000 subscribers, what he used - and was told phplist is the only option for SME mailings!

The Result

Through an effective setup, including cron jobs, we managed to get the setup costs of this solution down to the cost of one months subscription to an alternative paid solution. Design costs are also greatly reduced as the system is so easy to work with, no messy include codes. The client reaches as many clients, for around half the cost - while ensuring all their client data is in one, tidy place, properly secured and encrypted as appropriate.

Potential Pitfalls

It would be untrue to say we didn't have a few issues rolling out phplist for our client. To help others in the industry, keeping in mind we seem to be in the first 20% to actually offer this method, we have provided the below checklist of things to keep in mind:

• Always check hourly / daily bandwidth and email usage limits - sending too many at once may result in a temporary cut off of your services or total termination of services - thankfully we researched this before doing a live send.

• Keep in mind that setting up cron jobs can overload server resources, best practice only to use when necessary, and turn off for the rest of the time.

• Always ensure everything is correct across multiple systems before sending - testing is vital with all email systems as there is virtually no recall procedure - once and email is sent, it is sent.

Techy minded people check out http://www.phplist.com/ those with an interested in our products and services, please contact us by email at [email protected] or call us on 086 1780 743

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