In an insightful interview with
Website Planet, Panos Chourmouziadis shares the inspiration and unique features behind nuevoMailer, an innovative email marketing solution.
Chourmouziadis discusses the evolution from the early days of “Newsletter Manager Pro” to the advanced capabilities of nuevoMailer, highlighting its focus on robust performance, compliance with international regulations, and a user-friendly self-hosted model. By integrating advanced features such as segmentation, follow-up utilities, and extensive reporting, nuevoMailer distinguishes itself from other tools in the market.
This commitment to innovation and user experience makes it a preferred choice for businesses looking to enhance their email marketing strategies.
What inspired the development of nuevoMailer, and how does it stand out from other email marketing solutions?
nuevoMailer was introduced in 2010. It was a natural continuation of “Newsletter Manager Pro” which was introduced in 2004 for the Windows server family and it is still being developed today.
The LAMP stack was gaining popularity so we had to re-engineer the tool and make something new that works for any stack having PHP/MySQL. This means as you can understand, 20 years’ experience in the Email marketing field especially with small and medium-sized businesses.
When Newsletter Manager Pro came out in 2004 there were about 2-3 similar tools available in the market. Overpriced yet poor in features. Can you imagine a newsletter tool without an html WYSIWYG editor? That’s how things were then. Existing tools were mostly focused on sending bulk emails rather than measuring performance, segment, and follow-up with subscribers.
We still keep this philosophy and approach today. The omnipresent question is how can nuevoMailer be more of a marketing tool rather than an email blaster?
This is why nuevoMailer comes first in introducing features such as segmentation and follow-up utilities, micro-targeting based on subscriber activity, powerful autoresponders, and extensive reporting. As we constantly try to innovate we recently introduced some unique features for self-hosted tools such as Send-time optimization and offering your subscribers the option to pause emails instead of opting out.
If one simply wants a blaster then one can find cheaper and simpler to use tools. But if you are serious with your email marketing and want to get personal and attentive to your subscribers nuevoMailer is your choice.
Can you describe the key features that make nuevoMailer especially suited for handling large mailing lists?
nuevoMailer is used by various businesses and organizations of all sizes in practically every sector. So it has to accommodate businesses that have a few thousand or several million subscribers. We paid special attention so that it can handle multi-million mailing lists and the heavy traffic that follows a campaign.
A few years ago, we introduced a multi-threading sending plugin that can execute a campaign in several parallel threads, and by doing so you seriously reduce the time it takes to complete a campaign.
However, I should note here that software performance highly depends on the underlying environment which is the servers that it runs and uses.
How does nuevoMailer ensure compliance with international anti-spam regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM?
Indeed CAN-SPAM and GDPR imposed certain difficulties on email senders and organizations had to adapt. Bulk mailing tools cannot stop you from abusing them. This sounds similar to “It is drivers that cause accidents, not cars”.
So as tool designers, we try to offer features that will make it simpler and easier for our users to comply with the laws.
nuevoMailer besides having an instant opt-out, one-click mechanism, it also has a double opt-in verification system. It records the subscriber’s IP address and time of confirmation.
In addition, it keeps detailed records of the subscriber’s IP and the time at opt-in and opt-out steps. It has opt-out filters when importing data so that you don’t accidentally re-import subscribers who have opted out. In the context of GDPR, it also has a setting to remove all traces of a subscriber from all collected data.
What benefits do users gain from nuevoMailer’s self-hosted model compared to cloud-based email marketing services?
nuevoMailer is a self-hosted tool. Allow me to clarify here that by self-hosted we mean that the user is free to choose where to install the software. It does not mean that you have to make your office a data center.
On the other hand, we have cloud-based email marketing services. A significant difference is that nuevoMailer involves a one-time license cost where services have ongoing, recurrent, usually volume-based fees.
And sometimes you still have to pay for the service even if you don’t send it at all. Both models have pros and cons. There isn’t one best solution. For many users, a cloud-based service will be more suitable and perhaps easier since it involves fewer technicalities.
The most significant benefit of a self-hosted solution is the long-term cost of ownership. If you think about it you can recover the acquisition cost from your very first campaign which hopefully will generate some revenue.
Another major benefit is that you own your data. You know what and how is stored and used. And since you also have access to the source code you can tweak the tool if you like and adapt it to your business workflow. Therefore expandability and scalability are also important benefits of self-hosted solutions.
The trend today is a hybrid model. Most hosting plans allow anything from 400 to 800 emails/hour. Which translates to 9-19k emails per day. If this is not sufficient one can use a 3rd party smtp services provider like Amazon SES or SendGrid. It costs $1 to send 10k emails with Amazon SES!
Could you explain how nuevoMailer’s integration capabilities, such as with Zapier and RESTful API, enhance the user experience?
Not every business can afford or justify a fully featured ERP software. So we have situations where you have different, isolated software tools that do not talk to each other. But most businesses will have some sort of CRM, CMS, or a shopping cart system which they also use for contact management.
We paid special attention to offer interconnectivity features in nuevoMailer and it is really a pleasure to see that our customers value and use them.
Such interconnectivity is usually accomplished with an API. The API allows you to send data from nuevoMailer and receive data in nuevoMailer from another system.
To give you some simple examples: You can send an opt-out or opt-in event with the subscriber details from nuevoMailer to another system so you can update an external database.
You can send an opt-in event from another system to nuevoMailer. So you captured a lead using another tool and you automatically share this with nuevoMailer.
The nuevoMailer Zapier app is also very useful for our customers. It relies on the nuevoMailer API. So it is not just Zapier but customers can use other similar tools as well.
Find out more at:
www.nuevomailer.com
