What no Campaign Monitor/Mailbuild? Is there any particular reason why they've been left out of this report?

I've looked at a lot of providers and these guys are the cream of the crop in my experience. Ok, so they're not going to give you the micro-adjustment of Lyris or Axciom, but they're perfect for most applications. The 'CMS style' Mailbuild is a god-send for devolving enewsletter publishing to inexperienced users.

Hi James,

Thanks for raising a flag on this. It looks like a good product and I'll personally be checking it out in more detail.

I guess the main reason for CampaignMonitor not being included is that it is not on the radar, but looking at the company there are other reasons why it might not sit well with our criteria for inclusion, principally that it doesn't have a UK office as far as I can tell.

Our buyer's guides are UK-specific and a key factor is a UK office, so that UK clients can get the right level of support at a local level. For some technologies this might not be so necessary, but it is for others.

We use a range of criteria for buyer's guides and try to limit the number of featured vendors to about 20, give or take. They are not intended to be comprehensive, as I don't think a 300+ vendor guide helps anybody (nobody wants to read a 5,000-page report; you can visit our supplier directory to see a wider range of companies). They are meant to help fast track clients towards vendors that we believe are of a suitable quality, based on their technology, service offering, anecdotal evidence, and so on.

The list of criteria we use can be found at the start of the sample version of the report (as well as the full report), should you wish to check it out in more detail.

Omission from one of our guides doesn't mean that the technology in any way sucks - we know that there are some great vendors and agencies out there that don't make the cut, and others that slip through the cracks. We do take a widescreen view though and urge companies to make contact if they feel that they merit a place in a future buyer's guide.

Hope that goes some way towards explaining things.

Cheers,

Chris Lake
Editor in Chief

Hey James,

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that a UK office isn't always necessary from a practical perspective, though to some degree it is a statement of intent from a company that it plans to be active over here.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out Campaign Monitor. It looks like a great tool and ideal for smaller operators / publishers, so I'm going to start using it myself for some other websites that I run ;  )

Cheers,

c.

Return Path works by giving you a bunch of addresses at various ISPs that they have set up to monitor deliverability. You add these to your lists and they use them to tell you how your emails are performing. As far as I know they don't receive any personal data about your subscribers to provide the service, so I wouldn't expect there to be a data protection issue with using their service. You should check with someone more qualified in the legislation than me for your specific circumstances though.

Incidentally, my US company provides email services to EU-based companies, and to cover the data protection requirements for transfer of data outside the EU, we are members of the DMA's Safe Harbor Program. If you transfer personal data to any company in the US, make sure they have a Safe Harbor agreement in place.