Ignore Twitter. Forget about Facebook. Don't even bother with Google+. If you want a social channel that your readers use every single day, without fail - then you need to have their email addresses.
Email is the most scalable way to make sales with new customers and build deeper relationship with deeper customers. This means if you don't already have a list...
You need to start building your list, and pronto.
More...
NOTE: If you sign up for Sendy through one of my links I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.
Special Bonus: Click here to download three responsive email templates that work really nicely with Sendy. It's of utmost importance to use a responsive template as your emails will more than likely be read on mobiles, tablets as well as desktops.
The trouble is, for the beginner blogger or email marketer, there is a bewildering array of service providers who are all vying for your hard earned dollar.
Which of these is best? It's a question that has been asked many times before - and while I do not have the definitive answer, I'd like to explain why I feel Sendy is by far and away the best tool for the job.
So - what exactly is Sendy.
Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter program that lets you send trackable emails via the Amazon - Simple Email Service (SES). This means it is possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.
In addition to the low upfront cost, and incredibly cheap monthly costs - it's packed full of all the features that you will need to use on a regular basis, such as hello, goodbye emails, autoresponders, campaign reports, multiple brands and multiple lists.
How Much Can you Save with Sendy?
Remember: A penny saved is a penny earned.
Depending on how many subscribers and how many emails you send - you can save a LOT of money.
I've only got a small list, and after a few years using Aweber, I realised that I was wasting money every single month. Take a look at a couple of charts I put together highlighting the potential savings you could make by switching to Sendy.
In my case I'd been with Aweber close to 3 years meaning I'd spent at least $600 over the 3 years, whereas if I just started straight away with Sendy my total bill for the 3 years would have been closer to $100. A pretty significant saving.
The savings stack up even faster when you collect a good amount of subscribers, the usual service providers really ramp up the prices when you have above 5,000 people in your list.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
PROs
- Very easy to use.
- Great deliverability.
- Cheap ($1 for 10,000 emails)
- Very flexible, I use it to send my subscribers to
a) different lists &
b) different thank you pages
depending on what content upgrade they want. - Not affected by the continual DDOS attacks Aweber keeps experiencing.
- Ability to change the code to make it work exactly as you need.
CONs
- Setting up the Amazon side of things is a bit of a chore, not hard but a lot of steps.
- Fairly Basis Features, Sendy doesn't have split tests or an easy way to segment your lists.
- No real time support (Ben, the developer is available via email and will answer your questions, but it is not real-time or guaranteed)
- Lack of pre-built templates many be a missing feature for some users.
- Technical knowledge required to actually get the software up and running.
Great looking reports - Every email you send has detailed reports that you can dig into. You can see bounce rate, unsubscribe, clicks, complaints etc - everything you need to continually refine the emails you send for improved open and click through rates. Here is a screenshot of an email I send when I first started using Sendy.
Do you need to be very technical? If you have experience of installing software on a server, and are happy editing some config files and maybe changing permissions then you'll have no trouble at all getting up and running with Sendy.
Room for Improvement - If Ben implements split testing and adds a bit of functionality around segmentation then there would literally be no reason for anyone to use anything other than Sendy.
If you want to save money - month after month
Then I wholeheartedly recommend checking out Sendy and getting it installed and up and running. Importing your contacts is easy and painless, and the monthly savings are well worth the effort of moving platform.
If you take the plunge and switch from someone else to Sendy - please don't forget to drop me a message and let me know how you get on. If you are on the list you can reply directly to me, or if you aren't on my list you can message me on twitter or add a comment below.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Sendy looks great. I installed it yesterday.
I can see that for most people the installation process would be a hurdle.
The getting started guide assumes a lot of knowledge and I suspect they prefer people to pay for help installing it because step 1 seemed intentionally vague.
I’ve been through the process of installing scripts and creating mysql databases many times before but if I hadn’t I think I would have struggled.
I emailed Sendy yesterday and asked them about the limitations of their software and so far no reply.
My next step will be seeing if I can get it to work with some wordpress plugings like optinmonster and optinlinks. If I can get past that I might make Sendy my main solution.
Glad you got it up and running mate, it’s certainly more involved than the usual WordPress install that’s for sure, but don’t think that there isn’t anything that most people won’t have come across before.
I saw on the forums that it is possible to integrate with Optin Monster, but seems like its not a simple task.
https://sendy.co/forum/discussion/2807/optin-monster-has-anyone-gotten-sendy-to-work-with-it/p1
I got a quicker response posting in the forums by the way, Ben the developer came back to me within a couple of hours helping me with a cron issue I was facing.
Yeah I read that already. It’s frustrating that they don’t post the fix because it doesn’t work so I’ll need to contact OptinMonster support.
And the same goes for the Optinlinks plugin.
So that’s 2 plugins already that I can’t integrate with Sendy as easily as I could Aweber… and I can’t find easy solutions online so I’ll need to email people to get help.
The little html form that Sendy provides is a poor way to build subscribers so getting it working with something more visible and attractive is essential.
Did you use Thrive content builder for your lightbox popup?
I’d disagree that most people will have experience installing scripts )
I think that’s the web developer in you talking )) I think that most typical bloggers or MailChimp/Aweber customers won’t be used to installing scripts manually.
There is probably a whole host of people that could benefit from Sendy who will be put off by the knowledge required to install it.
It’s a pity because a set of good screen capture videos could be made in an afternoon and make the process much less intimidating, but maybe the makers of Sendy also believe that everyone knows how to do this kind of stuff )
However I will say that even if it is a bit tricky to get Sendy working that it looks really good and I’m impressed.
The cost savings could make it well worthwhile.
Thanks Alastair!
Yeah with the Thrive Content Builder, I click on ‘Autoresponder Code’, paste in the form that Sendy gives me – it parses out the fields and works first time!
Did you actually test it with OptinLinks and it didn’t work? Would be interesting to see if you get it working with either of these.
Yeah I pasted the Sendy form into Optinlinks and it didn’t work. To be fair I tried pasting an Aweber form and that didn’t work either.
Optinlinks did work first time with the Aweber API but Aweber forces you to use double opt in when you use the API at least until you have built a reputation with them.
After seeing people try to get my Amazon Keyword Research doc but failing because of the double opt-in I want to go down the single opt in route.
Hence my interest in Sendy because it gives your increased control, I just need to work through these teething problems )
That’s interesting, I found Aweber would give me single optin when I emailed them requesting it!
I upraded OptinMonster and this time it worked. Just copied the sendy html form into Optin monster.
However, it just replaces the form on the OptinMonster popup with the Sendy form. So I had to style it myself to get it looking better.
So again more complexity for the Sendy option )
I’m starting to think that Sendy is only really a good option for people that have the tech skills to handle the little quirks.
The form you are provided by Sendy is completely un-styled. I’m sure it’s possible to look at the styled Optin Monster form and reproduce that in Sendy, so whenever you add a new list/need a new form it will come pre-styled.
Hey Steve, Alistair,
Just want to let you guys know that I’ve made a plugin to integrate OptinMonster with Sendy. This plugin makes the integration between these two excellent plugins/software quite seamless and very easy to use. You can check it out at http://appvisionaire.com/downloads/optinmonster-sendy-integration-addon
Cheers.
Thanks for letting us know!
Nice post Steve. I also moved away from Aweber to Sendy and now I’m involved in https://emailoctopus.com. They’re worth checking out, setting up Amazon SES is far easier and because they’re hosted on Amazon AWS you can send 62k emails a month absolutely free.
Oh and EmailOctopus is still free too!
Thanks Gareth, do you address the issues I have with Sendy – namely a lack of advanced featured like easy segmentation, automated A/B testing, one click subscribe links etc?
Hi,
Did you consider, or compare this solution to ARP Reach?
ARP Reach (which I own) seems to be a good script but I have not been impressed at all by their support.
For that reason I am currently using Getresponse but looking into this one.
Dale.
I didn’t Dale, have never heard of ARP Reach either – but will take a look at their site.
Try emailing Ben at Sendy, I found him happy to help, but I felt that he was under a lot of pressure and dealing with all the support himself, so all his answers are quite standoff-ish.
You can also try esend.io which offers more advanced features like segmentation and A/B testing and much cheaper than any of other platforms. There is no need to host your servers. They only charge $0.10 per 1000 emails. They also offer a free tier with 2000 emails/day.