We’ve tried quite a few open source email marketing solutions from Mailman, to PHPMailer, to poMMo and they all suck for one reason or another. Here are our reasons why:
1. They are self hosted solutions
In our experience, self hosting email marketing rarely works out well. Most hosting providers have tight limits on how many emails can be sent per hour from a given domain. A somewhat average limit of 300 emails/hour implies that it would take 16 hours and 40 minutes to email a list of 5,000 addresses. While that could be acceptable in certain circumstances, it is less than ideal for a big marketing push or product launch. Hit 10,000+ addresses and you are talking in days, not hours. No good for us or our clients!
2. They have clunky and non-intuitive interfaces
We’re BIG supporters of open source software, but have yet to see an open source email marketing tool that has been as slick as the likes of Campaign Monitor or MailChimp. When passing off open source software to a client, pray they are somewhat technology proficient or you have a support nightmare on your hands. The best client interface we’ve seen to date is poMMo, but it still leaves much to be desired.
3. They lack crucial features for professional use
To be usable by a business with any sizable email address list, an email marketing tool has a few “must-have” features:
- Email throttling
- Intuitive and simple administration interface
- Elegant WYSIWYG email editor (with the ability hand-edit HTML if necessary)
- Automated bounce handling
- Comprehensive analytical tools to measure campaign success
4. There is no strong community
Unlike many other great open source projects, we’ve found much to be desired in the communities for the top open source email solutions. This makes support and bug fixes a disaster zone.
You tell us…
Have you found any great open source email marketing tools that we have missed? Disagree? Let us hear from you…
Comments
10 Comments
You should probably try interspire. If you look there really is nothing can compare to their open source offerings.
@Brad – Funny you should mention Interspire. I just came across their email marketing stuff yesterday as I was checking out their shopping cart software. I really like their stuff…didn’t think it was open source though?
OK, now we have 4 reasons, why open source email marketing sucks. But what are the alternatives that you would recommend?
Have you ever tried openemm.org?
@Holger – Thanks for the comment. You know, to this point I still haven’t seen anything that is a really nice tool in the open source world. I haven’t actually tried OpenEMM, but at a first glance it seems like a good feature set, but the interface is lacking. Do you have any experience with it?
@Garrett: I had installed it once, but didn’t like the interface too much either. Didn’t have the chance to really use it, because of lack of opportunity.
With alternatives I meant also outside the open source world. Because if the open source tools suck, then we need to look around for alternatives, don’t we?
@Holger – We currently have an email marketing service of our own (http://www.blueemberdesign.com/email-marketing/) that is a paid service. The price is reasonable and makes sending marketing emails simple.
Ahhh, now I get what this is all about…
Message understood.
@Holger – Eh, yes and no. We’ve definitely tried a good number of the open source tools and had pains with supporting them. This isn’t really about selling our solution as much as it is about discussing the weakness of existing software. Consequently, we feel that our software solves a lot of those simplicity and usability issues.
Enjoyed your post, however.
I think the most important things to be looking at are feedback loops, throttling, content, white lists, list cleaning, dedicated ip’s, click tracking, domain keys and so on – rather than a geeky interface.
After all, better inbox placement is the game, their is no point in a campaign that ends up in the spam folder or dropped from the receiving server all together.
If you offer such things then you should be commended.
If not you should be shunned.
Oh, and you forgot to bag dada mail
@Brett – Thanks for your comment. I couldn’t agree more that functionality is the most important thing any email marketing tool will have. At the same time, we’ve found it really tricky to have customers who manage their own campaigns and an interface that is clunky or non-intuitive…the support calls alone make it a losing endeavor.
With a nice email marketing system, clients are happy and support calls are down. Couldn’t ask for much more than that!