MailBuild

August 18, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted software

What is it?


MailBuild: MailBuild is an email newsletter tool built just for web designers. You design a template for each client and they log in to their own account to manage their subscribers, create and send their own emails and view reports on the results.

Mblogo

Who makes it?

Freshview (formerly Switch I.T.)

Why is it the killerest?

I've been using Freshview's other product, Campaign Monitor, for over a year to manage my email campaigns. It's still the best software out there to send email campaigns for yourself and your clients.

But I've had several clients for whom Campaign Monitor wasn't a fit because they wanted to create and send their own (good looking) email newsletters. To meet that need, Dave Greiner and company now bring us MailBuild. It's a great tool for your clients that want to take control of their own email marketing.

The idea is a simple one. You design an email template for each of your clients using the simple MailBuild template system. Your clients can then log into their own account, add their own content to each newsletter using a very cool and easy to use AJAX-based editor, and send it to their own subscribers. As with Campaign Monitor, they can also see great looking reports on the results of their campaign and easily add and remove subscribers to their account.

The entire interface is so polished and can be re-branded to look like your own product. Your clients can even log into their account from your own web site.

Freshview have a knack for polishing their interfaces so that they hold your hand, and read your mind, and this is no exception. These guys really are an inspiration for how to properly do a web app.

What could be improved?

In an effort to keep things simple, they don't yet allow custom fields. This might be a nice addition, and Dave has indicated that if the demand is there, he'll add it.

How much does it cost?

Like Campaign Monitor, you pay $5 + 1 cent per email. You pay on behalf of your clients so there's plenty of room to charge each client a marked-up fee for your management of it.

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

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i've also requested custom fields from david for mailbuild (i beta'ed it so i've made too many requests of him already...).

so please, if you think you'd use custom fields, email mailbuild's support and request it!

Posted by: paul | Aug 18, 2006 3:36:34 PM

I think it is brilliant - 5 stars :)

Posted by: Ross Hill | Aug 18, 2006 7:45:33 PM

Great tool for a stressed marketer staffer.
I like the idea of organzing data with this tool, thank you for sharing it with me !

Posted by: Maria making pictures | Aug 20, 2006 1:24:48 AM

I like Mailbuild but I think it is missing an essential feature (a feature which VerticalResponse have recently added)...

Auto link tagging (i.e. suffix every link with a given query string) - this would mean that you could get proper reporting on your campaign from your web stats package (e.g. Google Analytics).

Joel

Posted by: Joel Hughes | Sep 24, 2007 6:22:14 AM