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…

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Many companies, especially in the current tough economy, are looking at their marketing budgets and are asking a very important question: “Where can we spend our marketing dollars and make the largest impact?”

When making this decision it’s important to consider that both PPC advertising and SEO have their merits. At the same time, they also have dissimilar levels of commitment (both in time and money) and use entirely different methods for determining their success. We’ll look into those differences here in an effort to help in the decision-making process.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Advertising online is an easy and quick way to drive traffic to a website. If executed correctly, traffic will arrive on highly targeted keywords and improve sales conversion rates. As long as the advertising bills are paid, website traffic should stay at its elevated level. However, stop paying and they’ll cut traffic just as fast as it started.

So what does this mean for a company? It means that pay per click advertising is a great way to instantly generate new traffic. As long as the campaign is active, the traffic will flow. This model makes cost per click (CPC) a perfect way to determine the return on investment (ROI) because of its distinct start/stop times and set number of marketing dollars spent.

Unlike pay per click advertising, these lines are not so clear with a search engine optimization campaign.

Search Engine Optimization

In most cases, it’s accurate to say that an SEO marketing campaign with a high quality search engine optimization company will result in a lower CPC than a pay per click advertising campaign. Here’s why:

Unlike pay per click advertising, search engine optimization is a lasting investment into the quality and success of a company’s website. There is no clear end to when an SEO campaign stops being effective. A 12-month campaign with an SEO professional that is halted due to budget issues will continue to exhibit improved results well after the work has entirely stopped. Depending on the industry, the competition, and the quality of the SEO, improved results could last for weeks or even potentially years. Because of the indefinite end to its results, cost per click is not an adequate way to determine the return on investment of an SEO campaign.

If the results are so long-lasting, why isn’t everyone going with SEO? Largely because there is a minimum required commitment to search engine optimization. A campaign can take weeks or months to start showing improved results and even more importantly will require patience, diligence and time to build into a highly successful campaign. If either time or money are limited, it’s likely that a pay per click advertising campaign is going to be the best short-term choice.

So Which is Right For My Company?

After reading this article, it should hopefully be clear that there are some core differences between how pay per click advertising and search engine optimization work and how their results should be quantified. Pay per click advertising campaigns have a hard start and end date, immediately drive targeted traffic, and have a simple formula to determine their ROI. Meanwhile, an SEO campaign may take longer to put into place at a higher initial cost, but the results will long outlast those of PPC advertising.

Want more information or need help? Blue Ember Design can build a quality Search Engine Optimization or PPC Advertising campaign for your company.

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In doing a considerable amount of local web development, we often come across the need to modify (or even completely swap out) the hosts file on Mac OS X Leopard.  While it is possible to do this through the terminal, there is a great little tool from Clockwise that works perfectly called Gas Mask.

Features:

• Syntax highlighting
• Simple hosts file switching
• Global hotkeys for file switching
• Automatic flushing of the local DNS cache
• Growl support

Gas Mask is currently at version 0.4 and can be downloaded for free on the Apple Downloads site. Enjoy!

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The Design Roundup is a collection of our favorite designs we’ve come across lately. This time we have great designs from CodeIgniter, MailChimp, and Squarespace.

CodeIgniter

http://codeigniter.com – At Blue Ember Design, CodeIgniter is our MVC of choice when building custom web application.  Not only does EllisLabs offer great software, their site design is great too.  We love the reds and oranges as well as the clear presentation of their message.

MailChimp

http://www.mailchimp.com – While Blue Ember Design does offer our own email marketing services, MailChimp cannot go without recognition.  Their site is clear and easy to use.  Also, their mascot is well illustrated and they have a great sense of humor.

Squarespace

http://www.squarespace.com – Squarespace is a nice tool for blogging or can even be used as a CMS.  Their website is just so sleek.  Great use of typography and we love just how crisp every part of the design feels.  Two thumbs up!

It seems there is an endless supply of color scheme tools available both on the web and as installable applications. Recently, however, we came across what is now our favorite color scheme generator in Color Scheme Designer 3.  It’s great for design inspiration or just to toy with for hours on end.

Top Features

• Beautiful and simple web-based interface
• Offers mono, complementary, triad, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic color schemes
• Simple color wheel for easy base color selection
• Allows for adjustments to the selected color scheme (i.e. max contrast, light pastel, and 20+ more adjustments)
• Lists all resulting hex color codes from the full color scheme
• Preview on a light and dark sample web page
• Export the color scheme to HTML+CSS, Photoshop palette, and others
• Completely free to use (donations accepted)!

If you are looking for a quality color scheme generator, definitely check out Color Scheme Designer 3.  What other generators have you used in the past and found good success in using?