Your Own Mailing List Software

July 28th, 2007 by admin

Pay Once For Newsletter Software

There are many mailing list solutions available. The solutions fall into the following categories:

Your own mailing list software running on your server
Outsourcing your mailing list functionality to another company

Mailing list software is used to run your newsletter to subscribers. There are many mailing list software products and they vary in price and in functionality.

Your Own Newsletter Software

The major advantage of owning newsletter software is the the cost. Buying the newsletter software is a once-off payment and compared to outsourced solutions, the cost is recovered within a few months.

Keep in mind however, that your hosting company limits the bandwidth on your website. when you are sending newsletters from your website, it will use some of your bandwidth available. Keep an eye on your bandwidth - and upgrade to a higher bandwidth before your website gets suspended.

What To Look For

When considering newsletter software, you have to consider reliable software - that is software that will no scramble you newsletter - that is subscribers get a lot of garbage in their mail box. You don’t want to be associated with an unprofessional newsletter and create an undesirable image of your website.

The newsletter software must include an autoresponder at part of the software - you will most definitely make use of an autoresponder - rather sooner than later.

The software must be able to send HTML newsletters ( this is getting more common - and looks more professional) and is the way of the future. Some of the software allows you to send HTML newsletters, but the knowledge required is that of a programmer - to be able to send an HTML newsletter. Make sure that the software allows for templates, and that the templates are easy to use.

Ensure that the software has a single and double opt-in feature and allows for an easy form to be put on your website, for subscriptions to your newsletter.

Look out

The only negative aspect in running your own hosted mailing list software is SPAM. That means that certain ISP’s may classify your website IP address as sending SPAM email (such as AOL). Although you are not sending SPAM, you unfortunately you have no control over this aspect. Somebody else might have used that same IP address to send SPAM and AOL deletes all your newsletters, even before it gets to the recipients of your newsletter.

Can you overcome this problem? Yes - I think so. Irrespective of whether you are using outsourced services or your own mailing list software, the biggest problem for newsletter owners is AOL. I see the same solution more and more on the Internet: Newsletter owners are blocking AOL users from subscribing to their newsletter. The message normally is something like: “Sorry, we do not allow subscriptions from this domain. Please use another email account”.

SPAM Complaints

Whether you are running your own newsletter software or making use of an outsourced service, you will have to deal with SPAM complaints.

This is actually fairly easy to handle if you follow the principles in preventing SPAM.

Use double opt-in subscription (That means the the person who subscribed has to confirm that he / she wants to receive your newsletter)
Always add an unsubscribe feature to the bottom of your newsletter (i.e. make it easy for somebody to unsubscribe from your newsletter)
If you receive an email of somebody askeing to be removed from your subscriber list - do it immediately.

Other techniques used are the following:

Use a reminder in the newsletter - that the user has subscribed to your newsletter with the IP address and email address.
Never be abusive in your email, even if you get an aggressive email from an irritate subscriber