email marketing software
September 28, 2006 2:45 AM   Subscribe

what is best email marketing software to use when price is a big factor and only functionality i seek is tracking opens ?
posted by finnstones to Technology (6 answers total)
 
i have a list of private companies and am looking to automate the collection of the ceo name for each one.
posted on Dec-30-05 at 6:01 AM PST


i need help market sizing. Iam trying to figure out how many small IT shops there are with under 25 people. I was given a quote that there are 50,000 IT service providers with headcounts under 25 that are selling a service, i.e. Managed Service Provider (MSP). The source indicated this number came from Gartner.
posted on Feb-8-06 at 7:50 AM PST


what is best email marketing software to use when price is a big factor and only functionality i seek is tracking opens ?
posted on Sep-28-06 at 2:45 AM PST


Are you by any chance embarking upon a career in spamming?
posted by evariste at 3:08 AM on September 28, 2006


Email marketing, except in the case of double-opt-in, is not ethical. You're not doing that, since you're trying to track opens; there's little need for that with double opt in. You are planning, in other words, to start spamming.

You may succeed for a few days, maybe a week, and at that point you will be shut down thoroughly and painfully. Even the pros have a hard time nowadays; amateurs, especially amateurs asking for help on AskMe have no chance.

Don't do it. And for God's sake, don't ask for help doing it. I very much doubt you will get it here.
posted by Malor at 4:47 AM on September 28, 2006


I agree that this is a sketchy request but there are legit uses for tracking opens (although I go out of my way to prevent most people from tracking such things on me).
posted by mmascolino at 6:50 AM on September 28, 2006


Email marketing can be very legit. In fact, I've used the services of MDR (a division of Dun & Bradstreet) to buy email addresses of educators and school administrators. They follow strict guidelines imposed by the CAN-SPAM ACT and they offer a deployment service that tracks the number of bounces, opens, replies, request for removals, etc.

"The CAN SPAM bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it contains all of:
* an opt-out mechanism;
* a valid subject line and header (routing) information;
* the legitimate physical address of the mailer; and
* a label if the content is adult.

The content is exempt if it consists of:
* religious messages;
* content that broadly complies with the marketing mechanisms specified in the law; or
* national security messages."

posted by mattbucher at 9:47 AM on September 28, 2006


Actually, twistedonion, you might be interested to know there's another option called "not posting at all."

Simply including transparent gifs (or even non-transparents) whose retrievals you track isn't going to work well in most cases. The most current version of Outlook doesn't retrieve images unless you tell it to and neither do many other webmail solutions.
posted by phearlez at 9:54 AM on September 28, 2006


Mod note: METATALK if you can't answer the question
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:32 AM on September 28, 2006


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