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Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

28 points by systemvoltage ↗ HN
We're using AWS SES for transactional emails and it hasn't been a problem so far. But, for bulk sending of marketing emails, I've only found services that depend on number of contacts we have such as MailChimp. It is just prohibitively expensive because we send a marketing email for announcements of new products, usually once or twice a year. For this, it makes little sense to continue paying $600-$1000 / year for MailChimp.

Curious, is there a better "hacky" way to send emails? I don't need analytics and a whole bunch of templating features like on MailChimp. I can manage my own mailing list just fine in Postgres. I simply need an API and I've heard bad things about using AWS SES for bulk emails.

Looking for a low budget infrequent mass email service, I'd appreciate some insight.

28 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 79.6 ms ] thread
cloudking
We recently switched to Klaviyo https://www.klaviyo.com

The UX is simple and integrations seem much easier to use than MailChimp, it's also a bit cheaper.

strzibny
I used Mailgun before and at work we have Postmark. Both good.

I also made the following table for myself some time ago: https://nts.strzibny.name/transactional-email-providers/

butekla
Omnisend, the best support there is.
jwithington
http://sendy.co

Yours is the exact use case that it covers super well.

Pay a one-time ~$60 fee and runs on top of SES.

asdfqwertzxcv
You can now also use most other SMTP services like Postmark, SMTP2go, Elastic Email, Sendgrid or Mailjet as of v6.0.1.1
jmconfuzeus
This is a good one. Since it's written in PHP, deployment is a breeze as well. Highly recommended.
netman21
I use loops.so a YC funded startup. It is a monthly charge though. But super simple to use for product updates. The "loops" part I have not used yet which is emails triggered by actions.

Kind of strange that you only send a couple of marketing emails a year. What's up with that?

systemvoltage
It's not really marketing strictly speaking. Our customers (~2000 contacts) want us to send them email when we release an update or a new product. They willingly volunteered to sign up. So, this is a little different than MyPillowCompany sending out spammy marketing drip campaigns day in day out. I could technically send "transaction" emails in a python script via AWS SES but it would be nice to have something that can also report bounces, deliverability stats, etc. I am expecting almost no bounces unless customer has abandoned their email. Our mailing list was validated by sending a confirm link to their email during sign up. That said, I am far from understanding how email marketing works and any advice is much appreciated.
tryfinally
When I looked into low-budget mailing list management, I ended up spinning up a ListMonk instance. (It's free/open source.) But you still end up needing to connect it to a mailing backend like AWS SES or similar. If you want to avoid SES, I'm not sure what better alternatives there are, but I'd like to know too! (I have extremely low mailing volume and would like to prioritize deliverability)

https://listmonk.app/

grepfru_it
When I was selfhosting bulk email, I found it helped to have a large number of good reputation ip addresses, Controls to stop mailing at the first hint of problems, Scrutiny over the email list to avoid sending to honeytrap addresses, overzealous throttling. It can be done it’s just a pain when a mail server gets blacklisted and you have to shift your setup to a new mail server (preferably on a completely different address space to avoid subnet bans).

It’s much easier with todays orchestration systems, but I’m out of that game because unless you are a well known provider some obscure university or small business will block your mailer even if you follow all the rules. Not worth it

altdataseller
Is there any reason you cant use SES for marketing emails? Or comparable services like Postmark?
systemvoltage
I was reading this thread and there are several warnings against using AWS SES: https://old.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/4269bx/ses_for_email_m...

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15493127

So far, we've sent probably 5k transaction emails using AWS SES and haven't had any compliants. One possibility would be to get a AWS SES dedicated IP for $25/month and suck up the cost of $300/year to be on the safe side. Thoughts?

altdataseller
I have been using Postmark to send marketing emails and recommend it if you are unsure about SES
propter_hoc
ActiveCampaign, which we also use as a sales crm. So conversions automatically go into the sales funnel.
feistypharit
I’ve had a good experience with email octopus. Converted a client from spreadsheets and big Bcc lists with little problem. I’m not sure how big or how many lists you have.

Https://emailoctopus.com

umen
great post , can someone tell me what for example mailchimp or any other big players in the market are using for there SMTP ?

also is there any good internet group that talking about this staff ?

SMTP , emails teach and such ? Thanks

hulitu
How to send spam on HN. /s In the end the thread is useful to build a list of domains to filter.
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cmer
One unique approach for lower volume is Gmass. It’s really good at what it does.
pentacent_hq
I’ve actually had good experience using AWS SES for marketing emails. I’ve worked with clients who use it to send hundreds of thousands of emails, and SES is probably by far the best deal you can get price-wise. You just have to make sure that your email list is legit and you don’t get too many bounces or complaints.

By the way: Sending marketing emails is one of the official use-cases for SES: > You can configure Amazon SES quickly to support > several email use cases, including transactional, > marketing, or mass email communications. > -(https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)

Shameless plug: I’m building an Open Source email marketing tool that allows you to use SES (or plain SMTP, Sendgrid, Mailgun, …) to send mass emails. You can find the repo on GitHub: https://github.com/pentacent/keila There’s also a hosted version available … and if you’re interested, feel free to drop me a line :-)

greensky23
Surprised to see no one has mentioned https://sendfox.com/. They mention having 100,000+ users, and requires a one-time fee for sending.

Misses some of the bells-and-whistles, but good enough for me and a few friends I know.