Newsletter service?

Hi Guys,

I may have posted about this before if so my bad. I'm looking for a newsletter service to send quarterly newsletters to my forum members. I would send roughly 3200 emails in one shot.

I'll be using this addon to generate the newsletter: HTML Newsletter Generator with Showcase, Resource Manager, Gallery & Attachment Support

There's a few things I need:

The ability to import a list of addresses every time I send the newsletter replacing the previous list without the user needing to opt-in. I would have already handled opt-in on the XenForo side.

Basically I'd be using XenForo to generate a list of addresses. Anyone who unsubscribed by deselecting receive administrator emails in their profile would be removed from the list for future newsletters.​

Or have an unsubscribe link inserted by the service that would prevent the address from receiving our newsletter in the future even if I re-import the same address for a subsequent newsletter.

Analytics would be nice. Open rate, links clicked, etc would be nice to show advertisers in the future. They don't need to be extremely in depth.

Bounce management would be nice. Even if the service just spits out a list of addresses that bounced so I can place them on do not email status.

Secondly, I'm a little unclear on how sending works. If a service like MailChimp sends mail from @mydomain.com a lot would wind up in spam as the SPF record points to my IP. Would I just add an additional SPF record for them or use a sub-domain say mailer.mydomain.com and point it's SPF record to the service?

I'm not overly concerned with price. I'd like to keep it under $25 per newsletter if possible. I'm also not opposed to letting the service handle all the mail for my domain including the standard XenForo notices for replies, private messages, etc if that means deliverabilty is better and I can get analytics from those emails too.

Thanks in advance,
Dan

 

Watch out with Mailchimp when you import a mail database (.csv or something). They have put in an extra security to check which email addresses are going to bounce. The fun part...they don't tell you which one it is. So if you have a few hundred mail addresses upload them in pieces.

 

Thanks Ray. I knew you would be the one who knows all about this stuff. I already a newsletter of sorts going out to users who haven't visited the board in 30+ days but that's just a list of active threads and not a true newsletter. I plan on dumping that once I get set up with the quarterly newsletter.

That's a great idea. I didn't think of copying a list of addresses to the server then having the user opt-in via Aweber or MailChimp. I suppose an announcement on the forum a few days before the opt-in wouldn't hurt either.