Although there are some really great email marketing tools out there, like Aweber and Interspire Email Marketer (formerly SendStudio), a few Open Source alternatives can also make you start with cheaper price. Remember that free is not always bad as these open source email marketing tools are often developed with collaboration from many brilliant programmers, ensuring you stable and reliable software:
1. OpenEMM - http://www.openemm.org/
According its website: OpenEMM is a feature-rich, industrial-strength enterprise software for professional e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing. Moreover, OpenEMM lets you send event and time triggered transaction e-mails. OpenEMM is the first open source application for e-mail marketing. However, the installation needs a little technical background. But the rewards are totally free, totally powerful.
2. DadaMail - http://mojo.skazat.com/
Dada Mail has been around for awhile. Its written in Perl and can be set to use a flat file or a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. The installation can be a bit daunting, but worth the effort. Once installed you can use it to generate your subscription form and cut and paste that into your website easily. Read our Dada Mail review here.
3. PhpList - http://www.tincan.co.uk/phplist
The description on their website reads: "PHPlist is a double opt-in newsletter manager. It is written in PHP and uses an SQL database for storing the information. PHPlist is software that runs on a server." The install is also quite simple but I found the interface less friendly than Dada Mail's. However it has some nice prebuilt features like Open and Click Tracking, plus a nice ability to pickup from the last email in case the sending fails midway.
4. Infinite Responder - http://infinite.ibasics.biz/
Unlike the 2 above, this is an Sequential Autoresponder developed with PHP that allows you to time your messages. It has an opt-in feature plus allows for Unlimited Autoresponders. A nice piece of software with an active forum to ask for help when you need it.
5. Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager - http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html
Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more. See the features page for details.
Be noted that Majordomo is not listed because it's far too complicated for this email marketing purpose.
Besides for the purpose of Open Source, Another reason of using tools like these is that the information is in MySQL and that's easy to integrate into other membership registration forms. You can even program your order form to automatically capture buyer's email addresses into the same database but use the tools above to contact them.
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