Selecting your Email Marketing provider is a VERY important decision any website or online business will make. Why? Because once you make your pick, it is VERY difficult to change the provider if you decide to change your mind in the future. I know what you are thinking. You could always export your list to Excel or CSV and import it into another list management product, right? Yes, but there's a catch. Most list management software require your subscribers to opt in again when you import a list. This is to ensure compliance with the Spam act and make sure that all your subcribers have actually expressed interest to be part of your site. Furthermore, it's not just the list. Each product has analytics and tracking info that cannot be transffered from one product to the other easily. In Email marketing, knowing the history of a specific email list is very important in order to be able to segment your list and make a targeted pitch to each segment. So, long story short, once you pick an email marketing solution, you are more or less married to it for life. I know that sounds scary, but it's true.
First off, you need to decide between a Server Software based solution versus Hosted Solution. The difference is that a server-based solution is a software product you buy and install on your server (or even desktop, in the case of certain products). Hosted solutions manage your mailing lists on their servers.
Server Based software:
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