LinuxEmailMarketingSoftware.com is a site that helps individuals and companies find the best email marketing software for their needs.
We do this by reviewing the top products, then listing them in order of preference for each category.
We also provide a comparison chart with pricing and key features for each product we list.
The site was established in 2012 to help small businesses get started with email marketing. It has expanded to now include companies of all sizes, as well as freelancers who are looking for a great tool to use on their own projects.
Linux Email Marketing Software
In 2022, marketers have more channels than ever before to reach customers. Savvy marketers use every combination of social media, direct mail, chat, display ads, SMS, web landing pages, and even the metaverse to get their messages in front of consumers. But it may surprise you to learn just how central email is to many successful digital campaigns.
According to recent research from HubSpot, one of our Editors’ Choice winners for email marketing tools, fully 64% of small businesses use email to reach customers—a higher rate than for any other digital channels save social media and websites. And whether it was due to isolation during the global pandemic or for some other reason, 77% of marketers saw increased customer engagement with email in 2021 versus 2020. It’s little surprise, then, that four out of five survey respondents said they’d rather give up on social media than on email.
To succeed at email marketing, however, takes more than a spreadsheet full of email addresses. You’ll need tools to help you compose, send, and track your emails, and even to integrate data from your email campaigns with your other backend systems. Fortunately, plenty of help is available. In this roundup, we tested 11 of the top email marketing platforms and rank the best ones. But what makes them the best? Here are some topics to consider.
What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether these were opened and read. Options range from text-based template solutions that marketers can quickly make their own to more complex HTML or JavaScript templates. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started, nor is it an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup have affordable starter plans, and some even offer onboarding services for new customers.
Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide their most effective marketing tactic is a value-add newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others might want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, so they can provide special offers and deals to recipients.
Each approach requires different tools for creating the source email and sending it to recipients. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographic slices and engagement levels. And you’ll probably want to integrate with other back-end systems, such as the accounting system, the customer relationship management (CRM) system, and the inventory management system.
The Best Email Marketing Practices in 2022
Marketers have many more channel tools available to them these days than they did even just a few years ago. Social media, mobile and text marketing (see below), and even video campaigns compete for marketers’ budget dollars. With all those options available to them, many wonder if it’s time to give email the boot.
(Image courtesy of Statista)
As we’ve said, email remains the most pervasively used communications channel in the world outside of verbal communication. According to market research firm Statista, the number of global email users will grow to about 4.5 billion in 2022, up from around 4 billion in 2021. That trend is reflected in Statista’s forecast of email marketing’s global market valuation through 2027. That forecast projects email marketing to grow to almost $18 billion by 2027. So let’s put thoughts of email’s demise behind us.
However, one important change for email marketing has been the increase in engagement on mobile devices, rather than PCs. Mobile users access emails throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to Apple Pay and Google Pay services, smartphones have also evolved as mobile payment solutions. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop allowing customers to go from marketing to purchase in a single session.
The increasing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should provide at least a preview of how your email will look on a typical mobile device, and better yet, on several screens of varying sizes. Even better, the designer should also automatically render your email in a responsive format, meaning the HTML will correctly size images and other elements depending on the device used to view them.
You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may force you to create custom reports to see this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.
That leads us to another modern trend in email marketing tools, which is integration with other systems, most notably CRM. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense, because both types of software deal with managing and communicating with customers. Other email marketing systems will be able to plug directly into your existing CRM.
There is also a rising trend towards third-party e-commerce integration. You’ll find this in several of our contenders, including Editors’ Choice winner Mailchimp. These email marketing services generally offer several different but compatible services. You can create a store, process payments, and move it along with dedicated marketing and sales tools when you combine them.
Getting Creative: Email Plus More
So far, it might sound as though email marketing means the same staid, static messaging that everyone is used to, but this isn’t the case. Today’s marketers are finding innovative ways to combine traditional email marketing with other channels, including mobile and social media.
For example, SMS marketing is increasingly popular because it exploits an even more personal line of contact with customers. According to recent research, SMS has a 90% open rate compared to straight email marketing, hovering between 20-25%. That’s a clear difference, and it’s making marketers flock to platforms that support it. Email marketing vendors that have it right now include the likes of GetResponse and Mailchimp, among others.
But it’s risky for marketers to approach customers up through a channel they trust but is used mainly by friends and family. Some customers will react badly no matter what, but almost all of them will want to unsubscribe if they suddenly start getting ongoing SMS messages from people or organizations they don’t even know. That’s why savvy marketers don’t simply jump on new channels like mobile or SMS. They carefully consider the form those portions of their campaigns should take and the rules around creating compelling content, especially if it’s headed for smaller screens.
One way marketers can build more trust in their email messages is by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into them. One popular example of UGC is a customer review of a product, like those you’d find on e-commerce sites like Amazon. However, UGC can also draw from other channels, including social media posts and comments in online forums, including your own support forums. According to a study by digital marketing tools vendor Tint, 62% of consumers say they are more likely to click on an image in an email when it’s a customer photo, rather than an image generated by the brand.
Still, other innovative ideas are being introduced to the realm of email marketing all the time. Take GetResponse, for example. It’s built a one-button live chat feature you can incorporate directly into your emails, which allows customers to go from reading an email to having direct interaction with sales or support people in a single experience.
AI and Email Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a big part of many digital marketing efforts, especially email. AI improves email marketing mechanics such as A/B testing and more intelligent audience segmentation. This can help you almost immediately since it quickly improves efficiency and lets you make better strategic decisions around building the right campaign for different customers.
AI can also help personalize email content right down to the individual customer level, depending on how much information you can feed it from your CRM and sales systems. With the correct data, AI can choose different content, modify customer experiences on the fly, and even interact directly with customers via an AI-enabled natural-language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you need to look very closely at how a prospective email marketing service has implemented AI and what kinds of features it offers.
Another area where AI can help is with the marketing automation capabilities that most of these email suites offer to some degree. Automation technology is best suited for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. But an important aspect here is tracking the customer journey and the various touchpoints customers face from initial contact to closing the sale. AI excels in these scenarios since it can drill down to an individual customer and process the exact data for the vast customer volumes that top global retailers might get.
linux mailing list software
For running user or data management services, Linux is a great choice. Hence no exception with the email marketing and mail listings. In any Linux distro, you are getting a good number of mailing list managers to work with. Each of these tools has some pros and cons of its own.
But the confusing part is that you can’t say which is the best one. You have to choose one based on your requirements. We can just guide you through it. So, in this article, we have enlisted the best 10 Linux mailing list managers with their key features. Go through all of these, and we hope that you will be able to find one that meets your company’s sweet spot.
1. Mailman
Mailman is a mailing list manager for Linux. This software is written in the Python programming language. Mailman is released under GNU public license. Developers from all over the world are constantly contributing to improving the project.
The source code of the project is available to download on their website. The developers have provided detailed documentation on this software. Hence the non-technical persons of a company won’t find any difficulties using this email listing tool.
Key Features of Mailman
- The language support for this tool is great. You can create email notices with more than twenty popular languages from all over the world.
- All the tasks and properties can be managed by using the web-based dashboard.
- You can integrate this tool with any of your business or marketing sites at ease.
- This tool has integrated features like spam filtering and bounce detection.
- The newer version supports the virtual hosting feature with no restrictions in naming the email listings.
2. Sympa
Sympa is a mailing list manager for Linux that is completely free and open source. The main aspect of this tool is the secure web environment it provides. Sympa stands for Systeme de Multi-Postage Automatique. As the name suggests, it is a completely automated system for sending multiple electronic messages at a time.
Sympa is meant for professional use. This scalable system is capable of handling a large number of email subscribers. This software features an intuitive dashboard that is capable of managing all administrative powers and moderation of listings. It supports many relational database management systems for creating mailing lists.
Key Features of Sympa
- The advanced mail composer can create a beautifully formatted email message from an external HTML-based webpage.
- It has a bounce analysis algorithm that can create detailed reports based on the bounce rate. Even this intelligent algorithm makes it optimize the delivery time.
- This tool has the scalability to adapt to large systems. It can manage almost a million subscribers without any hassle.
- You can even integrate it with third-party antivirus tools like McAfee to get extra protection against attacks.
- The system admin can customize this tool to a great extent by editing the CSS and other components.
3. Discourse
Well, Discourse is a forum or discussion platform. But it has a great additional capability of managing mailing lists. The project is completely free and open-source. So you can clone the project sources from their Github repository and install them on your very own Linux server.
They have even detailed documentation on their Github page about setting up the development environment on your Linux desktop. If you don’t want to mess up with all these, then you can try out their managed and hosted Discourse service for your organization.
Key Features of Discourse
- It has theming capabilities to add up your very own look and feel to the overall system.
- Though this is mainly a forum space, your mail subscribers can be added to a separate forum for their discussions.
- It has advanced spam blocking feature for making it more secure against attacks.
- This tool supports additional plugins to extend functionalities.
- The intuitive admin dashboard has a very beautiful layout for high-resolution devices.
4. Dada Mail
Dada Mail is yet another mailing list manager for Linux. Just like most other mailing list managers, you can install it on your Linux-based servers or website. It has a web-based control panel for the administrators. The basic version of Dada Mail is completely free though it has some limitations with the number of mailing lists and subscribers.
On the other hand, you can go for the Dada Pro plan by paying money. You can either get a one-year subscription or a lifetime subscription. With the pro plan, you don’t have to mess with your Linux server system. Instead, the developers will install it for you. Besides, you will get constant developer support if needed.
Key Features of Dada Mail
- The web-based control panel will provide you an individual dashboard for each of the mailing lists.
- You can create customized emails based on the interests of your subscribers by using the custom mail template.
- This tool will provide you additional analytics like click rate, bounce rate, etc., for speeding up your marketing game.
- Dada Mail has complete documentation for all of its versions. Besides, you will get access to their support forum.
- You will get complete control over managing your subscriber profiles with custom properties.
5. Schleuder
Schleuder is a simple yet powerful list manager for emails. It runs on Linux-based server setups for managing email listings. This tool is completely free to install. There is detailed documentation on the website for subscribers, email list administrators, and server administrators.
End-to-end encryption is an iconic feature of this tool. This tool uses OpenPGP for highly secure encryption. It even supports mail resending. There are several plugins and modules like a command-line console for managing lists and a web interface for graphical UI.
Key Features of Schleuder
- It can be used as an email hub. That means you can use Schleuder to send and receive messages from non-subscribed persons.
- It theoretically works as a mailing bot. You can give administrative commands through email messages.
- Schleuder Web, the optional web interface, can run independently using the APIs from the original Schleuder system.
- The command-line tool named Schleuder CLI is based on Ruby programming language, and this is why you can manage mail listings with this in any Ruby installed system.
- If you are a developer, then you can improve this system by reporting issues and contributing to Git.
6. ezmlm-idx
ezmlm-idx is a Linux mailing list manager. This tool can efficiently and quickly send numerous electronic messages to a large number of subscribers. This tool is highly automated. It can automatically add or subtract subscribers from a specific list based on the criteria you set up earlier.
It has a great role management system that can apply restrictions on messages and subscribers. The subscribing and unsubscribing option is very fast and responsive. Users don’t need to wait to process the request.
Key Features of ezmlm-idx
- It has a message archiving feature that can save the old messages in the database without using high system resources.
- This tool has an integrated bounce management algorithm to give you detailed analytics on effective subscribers.
- ezmlm-idx, which is an addon to the original software, has more features than ezmlm.
- You can add the remote administration functionality to this tool by typing a simple command and manage the listings remotely.
- Additionally, it has multiple language support that is very helpful for the Unicode encoded languages.
7. Majordomo
Majordomo is an automated Linux mailing list manager for handling a large audience. This tool was written in the Perl programming language. Now it is maintained by a large volunteer community, and it is free to use.
This tool is built with a modular design that is easily scalable and efficient. The system administrator can control the dashboard and mail listings by sending commands through email. It supports many types of email listings, and thus it gained much popularity over time.
Key Features of Majordomo
- Remote list management allows the admin to manage it without accessing the server, which reduces vulnerability.
- It supports FTPmail that enables the users to connect to an FTP server for getting their desired files as email attachments.
- This tool has built-in protection against most spam attacks and fake subscription requests.
- Majordomo can send mail digests in bulk form, and it can automatically filter out lists based on expressions.
8. phpList
phpList is one of the most popular mailing list managers for Linux. It is completely free and open source software. You can either host it on the developer’s managed hosting platform or deploy it directly on your Linux-based SMTP server.
It can send bulk emails, newsletters and even handle your company’s email marketing campaign at ease. This tool is almost two decades old, and you can fully rely on their service. This tool is used in almost a hundred countries all over the world. It is available in all the major languages.
Key Features of phpList
- The package includes a web-based user interface for amateur system admins to manage their email campaigns.
- The duplicate resistant system wouldn’t let a subscriber get duplicate messages even if he subscribed to the listing twice.
- The analytics feature will give you details about the bounce rate and click-through rate.
- Importing and exporting subscribers list in CSV format is a great feature to back up your data to external storage securely.
- phpList supports scanning RSS feed and sends the extracted information through emails.
9. OpenEMM
OpenEMM is a great mailing list manager for Linux that is used as an email marketing tool for small and large enterprises. You can install it on Linux server distros like Redhat or CentOS. You can even install this on other Linux distros as well as Windows and Mac through VirtualBox.
You have to have installed Java JDK, Apache Tomcat, MariaDB, etc., to run this software. It has a web-based front end that manages this tool, displaying dynamic graphical analytics. You can even use a scripting feature to trigger your customized actions.
Key Features of OpenEMM
- It has an HTML-based template feature to compose emails and newsletters conveniently.
- You can build your variant of OpenEMM from the sources on Github.
- It features automatic bounce management with email open rate analysis.
- You will see several real-time statistics displayed with beautiful infographics.
- System administrators can extend the functionalities of this tool by using the in-built plugin interface.
10. tellmatic
tellmatic is not a very popular tool. It is a simple open source project used in email marketing that is archived in SourceForge. It is a PHP and MySQL-based system that is used with email listing tools for running marketing campaigns.
Though this is a very simple and straightforward script, the features are abundant. You will find all the common features that a mailing manager should provide with. Additionally, it can perform some quality checks to reduce spam and duplicates.
Key Features of tellmatic
- This tool supports importing and exporting email listings in various file formats.
- You will get detailed analytics on location, bounce rate, click rate, and open rate to boost your marketing campaign.
- It features an integrated form editor that can create subscription forms for different userbase.
- The blacklist and email address verifications are two great additions in the feature list to prevent forged subscriptions.
Conclusion
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