Email Newsletter program?

December 22, 2005 5:53 PM

Hi I would like to send email newsletters to my clients (about 100) and would like to do it all in-house. Are there good programs or tools to do this. If possible, I would like to know who reads it (I know ... privacy) by using images? / some sort of tracking if possible. Any ideas?
posted by bright77blue to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

To answer part 2:

At least 90% of your audience is going to use a mail program which automatically blocks "web bugs" and other non-inline images (Yahoo, gmail, and Hotmail block these, as do Thunderbird and recent versions of Outlook).

If tracking is an absolute requirement, you could just send a mail that says "Go to (http://blabla) to read this month's newsletter" and put the newsletter on your web server - however this method requires a bit more effort on the part of the reader and many clients may not bother to click through.
posted by helios at 6:01 PM on December 22, 2005

Best answer: You COULD send them out and and ask for a read receipt, but lord knows how effective that is. I send out one myself (for a band) with a list of around 300 people, and I find a combination method works best.

We bought MailListKing and it's a snap to use. If you can justify it, it's only $50.
posted by Sallysings at 6:20 PM on December 22, 2005

Oops. by "combination" I mean both an html mail with images as well as text. The program will do that for you.

Basically, if the client does block the images, the text version will show.
posted by Sallysings at 6:21 PM on December 22, 2005

You don't say which platform you're on. If it's Mac try NewsLetter it's free.
posted by tellurian at 6:32 PM on December 22, 2005

Hands down, lay down winner for this (aside from it being a webapp) is Campaign Monitor
posted by oliyoung at 8:38 PM on December 22, 2005

Best answer: I like mailchimp - it does the tracking for you automatically
posted by blag at 7:03 AM on December 23, 2005