Ask HN: What do you use for email drip campaigns? (InfusionSoft, etc?)

9 points by tronathan 14 years ago | 6 comments

I'm launching a new startup and I want to use good outbound email marketing in the form of a "drip campaign", where users are sent emails at 1 day, 7 days, 15 days, 30 days, 60 days after signup, and recieve different emails if they've signed up for the product or not.

I've worked with InfusionSoft but its $199/mo at the cheapest, and seen some alternatives like AllClients and Nanacast. They all have a very "1.0" feel about them and I'm wondering if there isnt a tool that is the preferred / state of the art for this type of thing/

For those that run web-based lifestyle startups, What do you use for email drip campaigns? (InfusionSoft, AllClients, Nanacast, etc?)

patio11 14 years ago |

MailChimp. Two cents an email (one cent if you buy them in blocks of $1,000 or more), not exactly ideal in terms of customizability (corner me online if you want the full spiel) but easily adequate for the "baby's first drip campaign" use case. They're also super-sensitive about spam which is great for you as long as you're so squeaky clean the sight of your smile could blind people at midnight during an eclipse.

tronathan 14 years ago | |

I looked carefully at MailChimp but I didnt see anything about being able to set up "Drip Campaigns" where people will get messaged using a predefined set of emails at given intervals after an event (such as a signup on a website). That's the secret sauce that I'm looking for - being able to add people to predefined workflows using an API and ideally push them down different paths, such as "Purchased" or "Didnt purchase after 60 days", so I can market to them more specifically and in an automatic way. This is what I meant by "Drip Campaign"

patio11 14 years ago | | |

The magic word you're looking for in their documentation is Autoresponder. With the API, you just have some sort of state tracking field (I think they call them "Columns") and then segment the main list such that particular autoresponders go out to people who match a particular column value at N days past signup.

Make sense?

gyardley 14 years ago |

I use MailChimp's STS - really just a wrapper on top of Amazon's SES. I might just use SES if I wasn't already running newsletters through MailChimp, although MailChimp's wrapper is nice.

The only event-driven emails I'm currently sending line up pretty well with Stripe's events, so I'm just detecting them when they're sent from Stripe to my server, and firing off emails when they arrive. But if I wanted to set up a drip campaign like you've suggested, I'd just set up a daily cron job.

polyfractal 14 years ago |

Mailchimp is pretty good for this, and is very reasonably priced. Constant Contact is another often-cited service.

If you want to get your hands dirty with the scheduling, etc, you can use a provider like SendGrid.

AznHisoka 14 years ago |

I just SES with Cron Jobs. That way I have complete control of customization, and can optimize properly.