Looking for a product like constant contact/exact target. I want to be able to send newsletters, marketing letters, and product annoucements to clients and manage opt in/out automatically, also support features such as surveys and reporting on how many people opened it, how many people unsubscribed to a particular campaign, how many people clicked on xyz link and who.

majordomo or another list manager? It's not possible to gather
information on who opened an e-Mail in a reliable platform independent
manner, this isn't part of any of the RFCs regarding e-Mails.
As for the clicked links: same thing applies. The only chance would
be to track the IPs of the person clicking and the IPs of the potentially
involved mail-severs (DNS lookups). Mapping may not be 100% accurate.


Cheers,
Tink

Actually it is quite possible. Using URL links and using a db. That's how all the players do it in the email marketing segment.

There are a lot of companies that do it, but the smaller ones have problems with being blocked from spam lists and do not have features like surveys and such.

That's a different approach, though, that's using unique URLs for
each person; no? And would only work if you own the visited site.


Cheers,
Tink

Actually I believe it just wraps the visit site. I am not 100% sure how they do it, but they manage it with companies like Reachmail, Exact Target, and Constant contact.

You can actually see a report of who clicked on what, how many, what percentage,
have a look at the screenshots here, it is quite nice how they do it, but they have a high % of blocked due to how many people tend to use the service to spam, and they do not have features like surveys. http://www.constantcontact.com/featu...-reporting.jsp

Exact target does, and there system is extremely impressive, but it like .15c an email plus like $2,500 sign up fee. You can send post cards via snail mail for that price.

Oh boy, that was funny. I just searched on freshmeat.net for
"e-mail marketing" and sorted by popularity. All the top-hits
are about security and spam-prevention ;}

I still doubt that there's a portable (100% reliable) way to
find out whether an e-Mail was opened. None of my mail-interfaces
use HTML by default, hence using the method mentioned above won't
work if I receive such an e-Mail.


Cheers,
Tink

Well most of the marketing emails are HTML.

Exactly my point. :} Won't work for most Linux users.


Cheers,
Tink

Linux users are not our target.

Well good luck :}

This smacks of spamming, and I won't keep looking.


Cheers,
Tink

Permission based mailing is hardly spam. As I said before, we are looking for a package that will make it easier to do newsletters and notification to our clients when particular packages get updated. We have that ability now, but we want to add surveys and more reporting.

In that case it's all tied in with your web-server. It will
need to provide the individual links per customer. What are
you running? Or would you be willing to change the web-presence
to a different tool for this purpose?



Cheers,
Tink

We would probably run it on a linux or freebsd box. We are not willing to change the presence, but from what I have seen from services like Constant Contact, they do not change it at all, I believe they do a forward with a unique ID that is stored in the DB. Each person gets a unique id for each link sent in each email. So it can track which address visited, and what link and what campaign. They all do a really good job, but to get survey support and a few other nice features the price sky rockets. And a good part of our messages are service bulletins.