What free software tools are available for email outreach?

2 Votes

First off, I never recommend starting with “free” (as in beer) as a requirement for software. Email outreach software is in general not terribly expensive – it’s easy to find good options for $20-$30 per month, especially if you’re not sending emails to more than a few thousand people. So make sure you identify what you actually need in email blast software, and don’t choose an option just because it’s free.

That being said, there are some quite reasonable free options. VerticalResponse http://www.verticalresponse.com is a popular and feature-rich tool that offers up to 10,000 emails per month for free to US nonprofits with 501©3 status. Like any software package, it has a few limitations, but no obvious fatal flaws. Idealware has a review of VerticalResponse here: http://www.idealware.org/tips/0807_vertresponse.php

If you’re more technically inclined, you may be interested in open source solutions – which are both “free as in beer” and “free as in speech.” The main contenders in this realm are

Mailman,
PHPList,
CiviCRM
or the email modules for Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress etc. (site content management systems).

All of these offer fairly basic broadcast email capabilities, in a package that needs to be downloaded, installed on your web server, and integrated with your email server. However, we generally recommend against any broadcast email tool that sends off your own email server if you’re sending more than a few hundred emails per month. If you send thousands of emails per month from your own server, you’ll need to manage your relationships with ISPs (like Hotmail and AOL) in order to keep your emails out of subscribers’ Spam filters and to keep yourself from being blacklisted as a spammer. This is not a trivial task.

-Laura S. Quinn, Idealware www.idealware.org

Labels: Email Deliverability, Effective Email