All I Want for Christmas: Sendy

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/all-i-want-christmas-sendy/

We asked SitePoint authors what developer toys they would want for Christmas, then managed to source them — without relying on Santa. This post was sponsored by Sendy. Thanks for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible.

Despite the buzz in social media marketing, email marketing isn’t dead and won’t be any time soon.

If you own a blog or company website, and you don’t have an email list of your blog readers or users of your product, you really should start now. Having a list of past and potential customers you can turn to when you have a new product is invaluable.

Why I wanted Sendy

While it’s hugely valuable, email marketing can be expensive, especially when your website or company is just starting out. The cost of sending newsletters to, say, 10,000 subscribers via larger email providers can cost over $75. The larger the subscriber base, the more the bill adds up.

For a writer like myself whose blog posts seldom generate revenue (yet!), I consider it an extravagance to pay a large fee to send a weekly or monthly round-up of my published articles. When the SitePoint team asked me for my Christmas wishlist, my first pick was Sendy, a self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable email via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

The experience so far

So far the Sendy experience has been fantastic. I have only had to pay $0.10 per thousand emails sent, which is very cheap. I’ve also had great delivery results and the support from forum and email is pretty fast.

Unlike other email marketing provider, Sendy doesn’t ship with pre-built email templates and an intuitive template builder. Since it’s self-hosted, you will have to install and get it up and running yourself, or pay the Sendy team or a developer to get it done for you. But this also means it’s more flexible, and can be perfectly tailored to your needs.

What would you do with a free Sendy license? Answer in the comments, we’ll pick the best answers and give away 5 Sendy licenses to the winners.

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Wow, that sounds amazing. I always prefer self hosted solutions because of the price. If I had a Sendy license I would start sending all store notifications and programmatically generated product emails through the service so I could track them better and start doing a/b testing without having to sell all the clothes on my back!

I’d set it up for my Chruch so it can send out newsletters fast 'n cheap :slight_smile:

I’d move some of my clients over to it. As much as I love MailChimp it’s always good to own your data.

Aside the fact Sendy is cheap, it’s a great alternative to the big guns like MailChimp and Aweber.

I do not think I would do it like that, hmail server does a great job for me and then with my general email used as the sent from address replies go to my hosted email address anyhow, so with hmail I can send as much as i like and just receive it again over normal channels. In my opinion that is.

It seems like a good tool… Ideal for my startup project… I’ll keep it in mind…

I am educational author & product creator and more recently have taken to programming.

Sendy looks extremely promising to create help people set their learning goals and automatically send them reminder emails.

With a Christmas gift such as this, I pledge to create an Auto-responder based course available for free by the end of Jan 2015.

I already have a copy of Sendy, and it truly is amazing. I was using MailChimp before, and switched as soon as my subscriber base got out of their free zone. After the initial Sendy purchase, mass emails now cost mere pennies to send. Cost is effectively no longer an issue. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that MailChimp had, but I never used those anyway. It does scheduling, and c’mon… we’re developers… I’m sure we can manage to customize our own HTML emails. Well worth the small upfront cost for those that don’t win a free copy!

Thanks for the Sendy license guys! Wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Already commenced working on the course I mentioned. Shall share more details as I progress!

Thanks again!

Congrat

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