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Mailchimp less-expansive alternative
Hello,
I'm looking for a less-expensive email marketing service.
Can you suggest Mailchimp alternatives?
I just need basic features like:
- a decent newsletter editor
- basic stats: like open rate, bounce rate, click rate
Mailchimp is nice and easy to use, but paying $75 per month for 6000 subscribers is really insane.
Not expecting to be free but, expecting to pay low amount for less than 10000 subscribers.
Up to now I've found Mailjet and Maigun, though Mailgun seems to rather be for transactional emails, not email marketing (so it may lack basic marketing features).
Comments
I recently worked on Amazon SES. It is pretty cheap. The setup takes a bit of effort, but once you do it it is a breeze. The cost is $0.10 per 1000 emails, so for 6000 subscribers, you will spend less than a dollar. Combine it with Sendy (https://sendy.co/) which is a self-hosted service with a one time payment of $59, you can send newsletters pretty easily.
Edit: If you need any help, let me know.
Or ask @mikept or @jarland about mxroute.io
Sendy is a good option. Otherwise, if you don’t want to bother and want to go the lazy way, https://mailpeak.com and we can sort out a custom pricing.
Sendgrid is quite a bit cheaper - should be $20 a month for 6,000 contacts & weekly sends.
Mautic + SMTP relay
Sendy + Amazon SES as mentioned above. Its liberating. I've tried a lot of other stuff.
There is also Mail for good (simple). https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good
Installed Mautic. I find it unintuitive. Haven't been able to send a test email yet, even after googling a few times and reading stuff in the manual. I see it does more than email marketing and that "more" (and which I don't need) seem to require me to read the manual in detail, just to send one test message.
I switched from Mailchimp to Email Octopus (they use Amazon SES for delivery) once I was paying almost $150/month. My bill is now $25/month and I get the stats you mentioned. Also has a decent editor. I'm happy with them (been using them just over a year).
My only complaint is my open rates have gone down a bit. Right after switching the open rate went way up, so it wasn't caused by the switch, at least right away. But over time it's gotten a bit lower. I don't know if it's due to deliverability of SES or subscribers losing interest.
Thank you for the recommendation!
Definitely our recommendation. Combine it with mxroute.io and call it a day
While mailchannels is great for shared hosting cause it hives you the hability to spot spammers, what other features it has over Amazon SES?
You may check their website directly at www.mailchannels.com
Most customers that purchase a plan from us already know the product and advantages. Definitely much better deliverability than SES, as well as support, webhooks, etc.
You can try sparkpost aswell, but you have to combine it with some other platform to store email data.
some people already recommonded sendy, so you can try that or you can use mailwizz or mailster from codecanyon.
You can setup SES with some subscriber management application. Otherwise, sendgrid is pretty cheap.
Thanks everyone for the recommendations, I found out about some interesting services.
Can you also recommend some open source email marketing software that uses SMTP?
I find Mautic not very intuitive. phpList and OpenEMM are bit outdated I think.
moonmail.io is ok but requires an amazon (SES) account
Sendy once again. You won’t be desapointed with it.
Only sendy and ses combo , very cheap and very effective
Sendy and SES user here too. It's great.
Quite some Sendy fans here.
Does it also work with a SMTP server or only with Amazon SES?
elasticemail.com
150,000 emails free/month
I use amazon ses for both and works just fine and very cheap .
I use separate regions for marketing and transactions emails .
How does the deliverable level? Is it good?
In it;s feature page, it mentions working with others SMTP servers too
I love MXRoute (in NY). I have mixed feelings about the .io sister company that is located at Portugal. I'm a USA fan.
How is the smtp relay service provided by the .io part?
But knowing @jarland is probably an A++ service.
never tried, my friend does. he said good, about 80-90% mail get to inbox rate
It is just reselling MailChannels at smaller amounts than you can get normally. You get a direct MailChannels account and route your emails directly to the MainChannels relay.
Might as well as name it Mailbucks
Sendy does work with other SMTP servers, but you don't get the same level of insight
@intovps
What was your decision?