With the advent of iGoogle and other services that let you manage your RSS feeds, I thought that email marketing and online newsletters were virtually obsolete. That said, I still get emails all the time from some of the websites I visit, like Expedia, RedFlagDeals, and Best Buy. As such, I can see the value that these newsletters provide because they alert potential customers of all sorts of deals and happenings that they may not have know about otherwise. After all, for you to read this stuff, you’d have to actively get into your RSS reader and sift through the content. By contrast, I check my email several times a day, so I’m bound to come across these subscriptions (and spam).

But what about the other side of the coin? What if you’re the one that wants to send out these mailings rather than receive them? Well, Mitchell Harper developed some great email marketing software for his company, Interspire. What better way to promote the SendStudio NX email marketing program than to order up a ReviewMe from yours truly. Here’s the exposure you were surely looking for, Mitch.

On the downside, SendStudio NX is not free. It’s going to cost you $239, but because the coding is completely open, you can customize it to your liking, assuming that you know your way around some PHP, HTML, and some other all-caps acronyms. On the upside, it is a comprehensive email marketing program, including the auto-responder software. It’ll manage your mailing lists, help you design your newsletters (with templates), and send out thousands of emails in an extremely expedient manner.

If you can install WordPress, you can install SendStudio. The steps are very straight-forward.

  1. Download the zip archive and purchase a license key.
  2. Upload the unzipped package via FTP to your hosting provider/server.
  3. Create your mySQL database.
  4. Run the short and simple PHP installation script.
  5. All ready to go!

Unfortunately, I ran into some trouble with the subscription form. When I got the system to generate the appropriate HTML code, pasting it into a WordPress page, I got the following muddled result. I’m sure it can rectified fairly easily, and the Interspire staff are there to assist you.

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After logging into your administrator account, you are presented with this control panel. From there, the easy-to-navigate system walks you through every step of the way. The online tutorial/walkthrough is also very helpful. You can manage multiple mailing lists, multiple email campaigns, and create multiple templates to best suit your needs. I found the process to be very easy.

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If you like (and have the time), you can create your own custom email newsletters, coding it line by line, but for the rest of us, Interspire has provided a bevy of templates that you can personalize and alter, ensuring that you still have a unique look to your email marketing campaign. Here are just a few of your basic choices.

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All in all, I was very pleased with SendStudio NX. If I ever embark on the email marketing trail, I will definitely consider this software package. They’ve had many satisfied customers, including dot com guru John Chow, who says that SendStudio is “the best newsletter software I’ve ever used.” Give them a shot, because you have nothing to lose, thanks to the 60-day no-questions-asked guarantee.

Click here to learn more about the SendStudio email marketing software.