Low-Cost Email List Management Options

Earlier today, I had a question about cheap/free email list management options, so I asked a big group of progressive web folks which applications they’d recommend. The results were impressively broad, and I’ve gathered them up in one list along with samples of what folks had to say about each product.

But first, an excellent overview article from Idealware:

• A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools

The List:

• Yahoo and Google groups got several recommendations, with Google apparently having a much easier setup and better delivery times. Also, you can download the names and addresses from Google, while I believe Yahoo holds on to them.
• Constant Contact (several recommendations, for instance this one: “offers a very robust system with a monthly fee, based on the number of e-mails in your database. If you send a number of e-mails and have a database up to 25,000 e-mail addresses, this is a good system for you.”)
• Net Atlantic, powered by Lyris (“An extremely full-featured email list system, and you can get it hosted for $10-20/mo”)
• Intellicontact.com (“a great online email service…it’s $7.96 per month up to 500 people on a list, and the price goes up…they give a discount to non-profits, and their system does track-open, unsubscribes, forward, and replies.”)
• Graphic Mail (“Offers monthly subscription fees. Note that this service is based on the number of e-mails sent each month. If you don’t send many e-mails each month, it can be cheaper than Constant Contact.”)
• Wild Apricot (“Also offers a similar approach but a different look and feel to Constant Contact, with a fee structure based on database size. Competitive pricing and they try to be more user-friendly.”)
• MyEmma (“A very user-friendly product. I would
  recommend it to anyone who does not have a tech savvy staff. They were also very easy to deal with. As I recall the rationale, we moved to MyEmma to have the ability to do more graphic emails and also to track activist activity.”)
• Groundspring
• EmailLabs
• MailChimp.com (“I have been sending some of my clients to MailChimp.com and Graphicmail.com for low end email lists — they are pay-as-you-go systems and depending on list size and frequency can be pretty economical. Both have good reps (whitelisting, etc.) and are smartly put together for ease of use.”)
• Graphicmail.com (See immediately above)
  
• Majordomo (“For those who really like to roll their own, Majordomo is my favourite OSS listserv app. but that’s largely a matter of personal taste.”)

Thanks to Denise McDermott, Roz Lemieux, David Crooke, Matt Howes, Rumi Matsuyama, Keith Krivitzky, Kaley Davis, Megan Fowler, Tarek Rizk, Heidi Hess, Chloe Schwabe, Marissa Brown, Heather Gardner-Madras and Laura Quinn for these suggestions.

– cpd