Overview of the most popular mailing list services
Mailing lists are needed not only to those who are sure that the user will not live without information about a new super discount or a promotion with flying shovels. Mailing is any interaction of the service with the user through his e-mail, for example, registration confirmation or service notifications. In our last review, we considered the advantages and disadvantages of the two ways of organizing email newsletters - through saas-services or using specialized software . If we talk about services, then on the market there is a sufficient choice of mailing services. In today's review, we will compare several of them: the most popular services in Russia, SmartResponder and Subscribe, as well as one of the leaders of the western market, ConstantContact, and our project, UniSender.
Of course, there are much more interesting services, for example, MadMimi , Mailchimp , StreamContact and others. Read the discussion of unreleased services in the comments.
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To begin with - a small presentation of the participants.
Constant Contact is a leading US email marketing, online survey and event marketing service that allows small companies and organizations to create professional email newsletters and conduct online surveys to study consumer opinions. Founded in 1998, the audience of the service at the moment - more than 450,000 customers.
Smart Responder is a domestic mailing list service, founded in 2002. At the moment, the service is one of the most popular solutions in the field of email marketing automation for small and medium businesses in RuNet. Amendment for 2018: Smart Responder has already closed.
Subscribe.Ru is the brainchild of the St. Petersburg company Internet Projects. Service founded in 1999. The number of subscribers currently exceeds 5,000,000, the number of subscriptions is more than 50,000. By the number of e-mails distributed, the service is the first in Russia and is among the twenty largest mailing services in the world.
UniSender , the youngest service in the review, is a domestic project founded in 2008.
To begin with, what is most relevant for Russian-speaking users is the presence of a Russian-language interface and technical support in Russian. All of these features provide three of the four services considered — UniSender, Smart Responder, and Subscribe.Ru.
It is also worth noting that these services allow you to work with legal entities with the preparation of all necessary documents.
Constant Contact does not have any of these features.
Each of the services provides free access, but there are various restrictions on the user.
UniSender and Smart Responder offer the most convenient and democratic conditions.
UniSender can be used completely free of charge if the number of subscribers does not exceed 100, and the number of sent letters is 1500 per month. If the number of subscribers is from 100 to 500, and the number of letters sent is no more than 7,500 per month, the service’s features can still be used for free, but you will need to include the service’s logo and notification about its use in each letter. Exactly the same information will have to be placed on your website.
In SmartResponder, the number of subscribers in the free package is limited to a thousand, and the number of sent letters is 50,000 per month. However, there are significant limitations: the use of attachments and the import of an existing list of e-mail contacts are prohibited.
In Constant Contact, you can create a trial account for a period of 60 days with a user base limit of 100 contacts. After the end of the trial period, you can continue to work with the current database of contacts on a paid account.
Subscribe.Ru also has the ability to create free newsletters. There are three categories of mailings - “Bronze”, “Silver” and “Golden” (categories are assigned by the administration of the service based on the potential interest of the mailing for users), but in all these cases you are not able to manage your user base and in fact are forever attached to Subscribe .ru.
Most services - UniSender, Smart Responder and Subscribe.Ru, - allow you to pay for services with electronic money - are supported by Webmoney and Yandex.Money. Constant Contact service only accepts credit cards.
Advertising service in messages
Advertising information about the mailing service is an integral part of the electronic messages in Smart Responder and Subscribe (in the latter it is present in large quantities).
Therefore, it is worthwhile to give preference to UniSender or Constant Contact - in these services the advertisement in the mailing list is completely absent.
SMS sending is a great addition to the mail (provided that it is legal, of course). Among the services in question, it is presented in two versions - for UniSender and Subscribe. Unisender SMS distribution provides support for more than 900 operators in 200 countries of the world, each account offers the opportunity to use any number as the sender’s number, an unlimited size of an SMS message, and the ability to schedule distribution at any convenient time. An API is provided for using SMS mailing by online stores. SMS sending Subscribe can attract similar functionality and cheap prices - with appropriate amounts, the cost of SMS drops to 23 kopecks .
Another interesting feature provided exclusively by UniSender is the creation of a mailing list based on the RSS feed data.
Unlike many other services that send information from an RSS feed to a client’s mailbox, UniSender allows you to customize the look and feel of the newsletter in accordance with the corporate style of organization, create rules for sending single messages and digests, as well as import the list of subscribers.
Each of the services in question enables the placement of a subscription form on the client's website. However, more convenient integration with popular platforms, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Facebook, provide only two of the four considered services - UniSender and Constant Contact.
Mailing statistics is available in all four services, but in Smart Responder and Subscribe.Ru it is provided only to users of paid accounts.
As the comparison showed, with a small user base, almost every service can be comfortably used for free. In this segment, Smart Responder and UniSender showed themselves best of all - both projects allow you to organize an effective mailing list for a small (up to 500 users) contact database on favorable terms. However, the disadvantages of the Smart Responder in the free package are the impossibility of importing the finished contact database and the prohibition on the use of attachments in letters; Unisender does not have these restrictions in the same configuration; A favorable addition is the possibility of organizing SMS-mailing.
The service Constant Contact proved to be less convenient - the user base in the free version is limited to 100 entries, and the usage time is 2 months.
And the most inconvenient service was Subscribe.Ru, providing a minimum level of comfort in the presence of significant restrictions. Nevertheless, due to the huge user base accumulated over the years, this service remains the most powerful and massive for the time being - and therefore, probably, so unfriendly. If you are interested in mailing lists on your own base, then it will be more pleasant to work with more flexible companies.
→ UniSender User Page
Of course, there are much more interesting services, for example, MadMimi , Mailchimp , StreamContact and others. Read the discussion of unreleased services in the comments.
')
To begin with - a small presentation of the participants.
Constant Contact is a leading US email marketing, online survey and event marketing service that allows small companies and organizations to create professional email newsletters and conduct online surveys to study consumer opinions. Founded in 1998, the audience of the service at the moment - more than 450,000 customers.
Smart Responder is a domestic mailing list service, founded in 2002. At the moment, the service is one of the most popular solutions in the field of email marketing automation for small and medium businesses in RuNet. Amendment for 2018: Smart Responder has already closed.
Subscribe.Ru is the brainchild of the St. Petersburg company Internet Projects. Service founded in 1999. The number of subscribers currently exceeds 5,000,000, the number of subscriptions is more than 50,000. By the number of e-mails distributed, the service is the first in Russia and is among the twenty largest mailing services in the world.
UniSender , the youngest service in the review, is a domestic project founded in 2008.
General characteristics
To begin with, what is most relevant for Russian-speaking users is the presence of a Russian-language interface and technical support in Russian. All of these features provide three of the four services considered — UniSender, Smart Responder, and Subscribe.Ru.
It is also worth noting that these services allow you to work with legal entities with the preparation of all necessary documents.
Constant Contact does not have any of these features.
Free access
Each of the services provides free access, but there are various restrictions on the user.
UniSender and Smart Responder offer the most convenient and democratic conditions.
UniSender can be used completely free of charge if the number of subscribers does not exceed 100, and the number of sent letters is 1500 per month. If the number of subscribers is from 100 to 500, and the number of letters sent is no more than 7,500 per month, the service’s features can still be used for free, but you will need to include the service’s logo and notification about its use in each letter. Exactly the same information will have to be placed on your website.
In SmartResponder, the number of subscribers in the free package is limited to a thousand, and the number of sent letters is 50,000 per month. However, there are significant limitations: the use of attachments and the import of an existing list of e-mail contacts are prohibited.
In Constant Contact, you can create a trial account for a period of 60 days with a user base limit of 100 contacts. After the end of the trial period, you can continue to work with the current database of contacts on a paid account.
Subscribe.Ru also has the ability to create free newsletters. There are three categories of mailings - “Bronze”, “Silver” and “Golden” (categories are assigned by the administration of the service based on the potential interest of the mailing for users), but in all these cases you are not able to manage your user base and in fact are forever attached to Subscribe .ru.
The possibility of payment by electronic money
Most services - UniSender, Smart Responder and Subscribe.Ru, - allow you to pay for services with electronic money - are supported by Webmoney and Yandex.Money. Constant Contact service only accepts credit cards.
Advertising service in messages
Advertising information about the mailing service is an integral part of the electronic messages in Smart Responder and Subscribe (in the latter it is present in large quantities).
Therefore, it is worthwhile to give preference to UniSender or Constant Contact - in these services the advertisement in the mailing list is completely absent.
SMS distribution
SMS sending is a great addition to the mail (provided that it is legal, of course). Among the services in question, it is presented in two versions - for UniSender and Subscribe. Unisender SMS distribution provides support for more than 900 operators in 200 countries of the world, each account offers the opportunity to use any number as the sender’s number, an unlimited size of an SMS message, and the ability to schedule distribution at any convenient time. An API is provided for using SMS mailing by online stores. SMS sending Subscribe can attract similar functionality and cheap prices - with appropriate amounts, the cost of SMS drops to 23 kopecks .
RSS feed
Another interesting feature provided exclusively by UniSender is the creation of a mailing list based on the RSS feed data.
Unlike many other services that send information from an RSS feed to a client’s mailbox, UniSender allows you to customize the look and feel of the newsletter in accordance with the corporate style of organization, create rules for sending single messages and digests, as well as import the list of subscribers.
CMS and blog integration
Each of the services in question enables the placement of a subscription form on the client's website. However, more convenient integration with popular platforms, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Facebook, provide only two of the four considered services - UniSender and Constant Contact.
Statistics collection
Mailing statistics is available in all four services, but in Smart Responder and Subscribe.Ru it is provided only to users of paid accounts.
Summary
As the comparison showed, with a small user base, almost every service can be comfortably used for free. In this segment, Smart Responder and UniSender showed themselves best of all - both projects allow you to organize an effective mailing list for a small (up to 500 users) contact database on favorable terms. However, the disadvantages of the Smart Responder in the free package are the impossibility of importing the finished contact database and the prohibition on the use of attachments in letters; Unisender does not have these restrictions in the same configuration; A favorable addition is the possibility of organizing SMS-mailing.
The service Constant Contact proved to be less convenient - the user base in the free version is limited to 100 entries, and the usage time is 2 months.
And the most inconvenient service was Subscribe.Ru, providing a minimum level of comfort in the presence of significant restrictions. Nevertheless, due to the huge user base accumulated over the years, this service remains the most powerful and massive for the time being - and therefore, probably, so unfriendly. If you are interested in mailing lists on your own base, then it will be more pleasant to work with more flexible companies.
→ UniSender User Page
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/125525/
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