unrealistic limits to newsletter emails

[mmreed]

I found out something rather disturbing today...

It seems we have limits to the number of people we can email per month using the newsletter feature.

My account is set to only allow 5000 emails a month. Now this is a serious issue for me as my newsletter list is around 2200 people. This means I can only send two emails per month to my people.

When I signed up, nowhere did it mention this limit. It stated limits to number of items, bandwidth, ect.. but no where did it mention a limit to the ability to communicate with your customers and newsletter subscribers.

If I had only 3 products and a newsletter base of 5001 people, I could not even tell everyone on my list about my measley 3 items.

When I contacted support, I was told there was nothing they could do - that my only option was to pay to upgrade to the next plan level - which I do not need... I bought the plan that fit my number of items and bandwidth, and since it didnt mention limits to emails, ect...

When I asked for some help around this and that I really needed to get a Black Friday newsletter out, the response was for me to look at a third party such as Constant Contact or similar service for additional fees.

I think it is very unfair to have such limits on us being able to email newsletters to our list. I pay $70 a month and am limited to only 5000 emails a month????? This is very hindering to growth and being able use 3dcart as my preferred solution.

Very very poor effort on 3dcarts side to provide realistic email ability.

For $70 a month, I should be able to email my customers more than once a month!!!!!!

I am now thinking I need to look at alternative options for my cart - If I have to spend another $30 a month just to have a usable email list... I may as well look at other carts...

Here it is two days before Black Friday and I am unable to send out special offers to my customers. Sales dollars down the drain.....

Come on 3dcart - I hope you see this post and do something about this issue. I can't be the only one upset about this.

[DaveW]

No help here, but I tried the built in newsletter service and found it very lacking, especially with a working unsubscribe feature.

I recently found MadMimi.com, which is 1/2 the price of iContact and COnstant Contact and pretty easy to work with. We have used iContact for the past year and not really liked it. Constant Contact works pretty well, but is $75/month for us with 7000 email addresses on our list.

DaveW

[maksum]

Yeah, perhaps they should list that along with the other features and limitations of each package. At the very least it couldn't hurt.

I'm sure each store owner's needs are different. Some will have a package that fits their disk space, bandwidth, and product count just fine, and never come close to needing all of the emails provided for that package. Others are the opposite.

As far as being up a creek for black friday, I would simply use a 3rd party deal until you decide on a long term situation. If you have that many recipients on your email list, I'm sure it would be worth the money to use a temporary solution for now.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Mike

[Mark]

wow!

I wish we had results from email marketting campaigns......:(

We've tried email and snail mail campaigns and have decided they don't work for our customer base. We issued a snail mail campaign for three years straight with custom professional print post cards with coupon codes and everyting and never will again. Same for email, with coupon codes, loyal customer coupons and savings, etc. Nadda.....we don't bother anymore. Just doesn;t work for us. Not sure why it works for some and not others....
Good luck with your campaign! :)

[cbsteven]

This is shopping cart software, not email marketing software. Yes, the limits should be described up front somewhere, but I have never seen a shopping cart that included email limits like what you are talking about. If you are serious about sending thousands of emails a month, you need to partner with an additional service. I love Constant Contact.

[widgets]

Question

For those with outside email/newsletter service, how integrated is it with the customer control panel?
For example, in customer view, I can see whether the customer receives email or is signuped for the newsletter.
I don't want to maintain two databases/lists.

[mmreed]

For those with outside email/newsletter service, how integrated is it with the customer control panel?
For example, in customer view, I can see whether the customer receives email or is signuped for the newsletter.
I don't want to maintain two databases/lists.

Exactly my issue - I dont want two different databases.

I dont want to have to manually export customers to get a customer list each time I want to mail customers instead of all subscribers, ect...

I just think 5000 emails in a month is very small on an account that offers you the ability to have 5000 items, huge bandwidth ect...

3dcarts excuse to have it that way is that they want to safeguard against spam... well, these lists are opt in, so it is not spam.

Id really like to see 3dcart up the limits.

I guess the major part that ticked me off is that no where was I told about this so I would know to plan ahead for this limit and not cripple my Black Friday sale.

Now I have to struggle at the last minute with trying to export my lists, get something up with a third party ect...

I want 3dcart to be my one stop shop turnkey solution. That would further embed my loyalty to staying with them... make things easy for me and you have me for life... make things harder, and Im apt to see what else is out there....

[JustPoppin]

I hear you about not wanting to maintain 2 lists but most likely, you already are. Read this thread to see what I mean:

http://forums.3dcart.com/general-con...-maillist.html

It's not a great set up. And as you said, with an external newsletter system, you are going to be exporting and sorting and filtering lists in Excel or something like that (which is what I'm doing and I'm NOT happy about it because it means I'm doing double and triple the work).

It really makes what should be a pretty standard and easy task - I want to email my customers and prospects - a completely awful and time consuming pain in the a**.

Currently, I'm using a system called Elite Mail which is a penny per email with no monthly fee or contract.

[mmreed]

without 3dCart doing something to address this, this is going to be a huge pain in the A$$.

If I go with a 3rd party, I can have people sign up for the newsletter - ok fine.

But in order to mail CUSTOMERS, I need to manually keep a synchronized list with this 3rd party - by exporting and importing every time I want to mail.

I see the need for the following lists:

Newsletter subscribers
Customers - that opt in for mail
Customers - that opt out for mail

When I say customers - I see that as anyone that created a customer account - even those that have not purchased anything yet.

Now if 3d Cart would just up the insanely low limit on how many emails we can send....

I pay $188 every 3 months and I do NOT have anywhere near the 5000 items that are part of my package. I have around 2200 people on my various mail lists... for $188 I would think I should be able to email these people more than twice a month!!!

If I need to pay a third party another $30-40 a month just to have a decent email service... that gives me incentive to look at other carts that offer better email communication systems with my list people.

Volusion, and other competitors have less restrictive email marketing systems and they are not that much more per month.

Please 3dcart - someone answer here about what can be done about this.

I want to make it clear that I really like everything else about 3dcart. You guys have a great system - the email marketing is just very weak, and that portion, at least for me, is critical. Doesnt matter if we have a great cart if we cannot market it effectively.

Please up the limits on emails... and maybe look at how the lists are segmented.

[lml]

We're switching over to 3D from Volusion & a gold plan at Volusion costs $99.99 per month and you are only allowed 1,000 email newsletters per month.

[mmreed]

We're switching over to 3D from Volusion & a gold plan at Volusion costs $99.99 per month and you are only allowed 1,000 email newsletters per month.

Hmm.. I wonder if they changed it. I called Volusion sales on Wednesday and spoke to them about the email marketing functionality and the salesguy claimed that a silver package (59.00) allows 10,000 email newsletters, and that they are soon deploying a "customer contact" feature that will allow unlimted contact to customers.

I hear mixed reviews of Volusion. Some love it.. some hate it.

I love 3dcart - I just wish it would handle my email marketing needs. I really dont want to pay more to be able to email my customers.

Life would be perfect if they would up the limit....

[lml]

I checked today in their support documentation & it states what I posted.

Volusion is terrible, in my opinion. The biggest joke is their 99.99% uptime claim on their homepage.

Ask them if they will give you access to their forum. Then you can really see the troubles customers are experiencing, which is probably why they went to a closed forum in the first place.

[JustPoppin]

Yeah, you gotta give 3dcart credit for that - open forum - airing the clean and dirty laundry all together.

[lml]

The thing about having a closed forum is that once customers are PO'd enough they will just negate that by starting to take their opinions to public forums..such as;

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?bl...78888657037741

But, I suppose damage control is necessary at some point.

[mmreed]

has anyone used

http://www.simplycast.com/features.asp

for email lists?

under $20 for 10k emails a month... I might consider moving my list to them.