Moving away from Mailchimp

newklear

newklear

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Have had a .com domain through Mailchimp for a couple years now.
Still not quiet happy with their setup as I feel their current enviroment makes it over-complicated. I am close to renewal of domain and looking at other options.

Has anyone had experience with moving away from Mailchimp and where did you go ?
 
Didn't move away, but ported an in-house port25 solution to SendGrid. Tried AWS SES as well, SendGrid is still the best I reckon.
 
What mail requirements do you have?
If you don't send unsolicited mail, setting up and managing you own relay servers is fairly easy.
 
newklear said:
Have had a .com domain through Mailchimp for a couple years now.
Still not quiet happy with their setup as I feel their current enviroment makes it over-complicated. I am close to renewal of domain and looking at other options.

Has anyone had experience with moving away from Mailchimp and where did you go ?
Click to expand...
If it's just the domain, you can transfer it to any place. Check domains.co.za or Absolute Hosting. The process is fairly easy.

If you are talking about actual newsletter solutions, then you have a lot to choose from as well.

If you are talking about mail sending. Then yes, a solution like Sendgrid/SES or even a basic hosted mail should work fine.

Depends on the mail requirements. For a mailbox or two, Sendgrid/SES is overkill.
 
If you just want to send notification type emails: AWS SNS

If you want to be able to build a full mailing system yourself: AWS SES

If you want all the bells and whistles with minimal effort to "close the loop", automatic suppression list handling, stats, template builders, marketing campaigns with A/B testing and don't want to build it yourself: SendGrid

...but the better it is the more you pay.
 
Oh, if you do go SendGrid, some "pitfalls" to be aware of:

You need to be able to handle two types of rejections/failures:

1. HTTP 500 or similar like server not found. I've seen these come through and all I did was retry a couple of seconds or so later. Using Kafka or similar and not committing the read will solve that or a DB where you store and retry.

2. You'll want to make sure you normalise text especially names like Ané Ömg to Ane Omg else they'll fail it because of unsupported characters. But once you've sorted this out the problem never comes back, but you'll want to add visibility on an dashboard interface or some alerting mechanism for you to be made aware of any email that didn't get sent and the reason.

But that's it really.
 
bratwurst said:
What mail requirements do you have?
If you don't send unsolicited mail, setting up and managing you own relay servers is fairly easy.
Click to expand...
That is one of my main gripes with Mailchimp. Each time I want to use an email address I have to add it through audience and setup a campaign and even then a reply to email address is via Mailchimp. Miss the simplicity of creating and managing email addresses in a traditional Panel setup. Could you perhaps point me in the correct direction please ?

The Campaign options with templates are fantastic so have made use of those.
 
|tera| said:
If it's just the domain, you can transfer it to any place. Check domains.co.za or Absolute Hosting. The process is fairly easy.

If you are talking about actual newsletter solutions, then you have a lot to choose from as well.

If you are talking about mail sending. Then yes, a solution like Sendgrid/SES or even a basic hosted mail should work fine.

Depends on the mail requirements. For a mailbox or two, Sendgrid/SES is overkill.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the advice and @Hamster also. Have given me something to read up on. Greatly appreciated.
 
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