Your favorite mailing list and how it integrates with your Drupal sites

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texas-bronius's picture
Posted by texas-bronius on June 4, 2010 at 9:21pm

I would like to hear what mailing list solutions you use and how you integrate them with your Drupal site for subscription management (subscribe, unsubscribe) and distribution (content creation? list management?).

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Comments

Back on 4.x, I used some

Posted by texas-bronius on June 4, 2010 at 9:24pm
texas-bronius's picture

Back on 4.x, I used some Drupal module (maybe "simplenews?") which seemed to do the trick nicely for a low-volume site. On another site, I integrated a static html snippet signup form for an off-host dada list, but it didn't help a user beyond subscription (or being told they were already subscribed if they tried to submit again later). More recently, I tried phpList but didn't finish with that one yet.

Constant Contact vs. CiviMail

Posted by Daniel Norton on June 4, 2010 at 9:42pm
Daniel Norton's picture

I used ConstantContact and switched to CiviMail. Getting CiviMail working was a chore, but once it’s working it’s so much easier to manage the ~5000 contacts. Here are a few things it does:

  1. Fully integrated with the Customer Relations Management system CiviCRM, which I integrated into my Drupal site.
  2. Automatically handles subscribes and unsubscribes. (It includes CAN-SPAM required instructions in the emails.)
  3. Automatically handles bounces, putting bad email address on “hold”.
  4. Provides a “live” report link that details # of deliveries, # of bounces, # of opens, # of click-throughs (for each link), and # of unsubscribes
  5. Allows sending a “magic” link so the user can edit their information without logging in.
  6. WYSIWYG editor
  7. Will send to subgroups and can exclude subgroups (such as those who were on the recip list of a previous mailing).

It has a few quirks and glitches, but I’m a good programmer and, like Drupal, it’s free, open source and modular.

We use simplenews

Posted by Silicon.Valet on June 7, 2010 at 2:15pm
Silicon.Valet's picture

For the most part simplenews fulfills our needs. For high volume lists, we'll suggest a dedicated solution. Simplenews is relatively straightforward to use (and much more lightweight than CiviCRM for us). The API is well documented and we've made several custom modules that take advantage of it.

Mail Chimp

Posted by gilbertovelasquez on June 7, 2010 at 3:36pm
gilbertovelasquez's picture

I use MailChimp for high volume lists - simplenews appears to be nice for smaller volume sites, but I say go with a dedicated solution when in doubt. I looked at CiviMail, it appeared to have strong user loyalty, however as it was touted as "designed for non-profits and advocacy groups" I felt maybe its functionality might lack in real-world for-profit solutions.

SimpleNews still takes the cake for me

Posted by texas-bronius on June 10, 2010 at 2:27pm
texas-bronius's picture

Thanks, all, for your responses. I was reminded how simple (and still flexible enough) SimpleNews is and have opted to go that route for my low-subscribership site(s). Looks like I can even queue up batches of emails out, which is a very desirable feature these days.