From the extensive reading I’ve been doing, most internet marketers recommend hiring a big name email mailing list management company, like aweber, icontact, ConstantContact, ezinedesigner, & MailChimp.  There are dozens of these companies out there, and even non-profits are hiring them.  All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of any subscription email you receive to see the tag lines for the service they use, to find out who they’re using.  But the larger your mailing list, of course, the larger the monthly fee.   And why is the fee monthly anyway?  Suppose your or your organization only email out quarterly.  What if your mailouts are just sporadic concert announcements?

When I entered a particular niche with a newsletter, I did a lot of research, because, frankly, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to invest.   But then it didn’t take much to realize that any web host provider worth its salt offers some email functionality, because most web sites have some forms functionality, and many forms require notifiying the web site owner by email.  If you have a high traffic site, that can be a lot of email.  On the other hand, you also have customers to reach, and sometimes you want to automate returning form requested information to them by email too.   So this functionality is already built into your web host provider, and you are already paying for it.  So why should you also start paying the big bucks, which often cost more than web hosting itself, to a newsletter management company? Fuhgettaboutit.

I looked at my own web host company, and they offered two options.  A small very rudimentary newsletter script, but they limited the list size lest you burden their servers with bursts of massive mailouts, and they offered a link to ConstantContact (with I’m sure an affiliate kickback to them).  My list would be larger than the inhouse script limit, but I didn’t feel right about forking out the bucks either.

You know where I found my answer?  Open Source!   I found a particularly beautiful script, poMMo, with all the features I could have wanted out of ConstantContact, including saving templates, or which I could embed, such as tracking, which had not been available just a couple of years ago when I first started looking.   Just a simple script installation — well to be honest, it had a pretty high learning curve before I could send my first newsletter — but for a one time installation, it will save a new internet marketer many hundreds of dollars.   Yes, it is true that there are some WordPress newsletter plugins that will automatically mail out your posts as they happen to your subscribers.  I even use one on this site while my list is still small. But for major campaigns, poMMo has a lot of nice features that the WordPress plugins don’t.  It offers the double-opt-in subscription feature, so you can be doubly sure your subscribers want to hear from you, it has the WYSIWYG editor for constructing HTML emails, and the functionality for constructing and saving your own pretty templates.

But probably the nicest feature it has is the ability to  respect your hosting service when your mailing list in a particular niche gets really huge.   This means it’s got the ability to throttle the delivery pace of your emails, so you can slow down the sending rate as your emails go out.  That way you don’t burden your hosting service with a sudden mailout to thousands of addresses and possibly shut down your own and other web sites until its done.  That kind of thing will get  you booted off your hosting service real quick.

The bottom line is, you CAN roll your own, while avoiding being shaken down by overpriced newsletter management companies.   You’re already paying your hosting service for the priveledge of communicating with your customers.  So use it!