I will be launching a group buying website (like Groupon), and I will have my site hosted on a managed VPS. As you may already be aware, the way these group buying sites work is that an email is sent each day to all of the subscribers, which is usually in the thousands or even 10s of thousands (heck, even more for some). I was planning on simply sending out all the emails through my VPS. However, I noticed that a lot of my competition is using MailChimp or Constant Contact to send out their daily emails.

Is there a reason for this? I am not a technical person, so I'd really appreciate if someone can please enlighten me on this topic. Thanks!

I'm struggling to find someone to assist with how I can integrate MailChimp/Constant Contact API with a website. Cannot seem to find anything in YouTube or other developer places.

Many developers want to charge $100s of dollars to assist, but I don't have that kind of cash lying around!

Suggestions would be great or any other assistance anyone can provide.

IDEA:
How to integrate APIs within a newsletter/e-bulletin form
Post this info. to a MySQL database
Connect database to MailChimp/Constant Contact for subscriptions, then send AutoReponders, etc.

Thanks for your time!

I urge you to visit: http://www.mailchimp.com/api/

The reason they use these third party services to send the email is because there is a much better chance that an email from Constant Contact (Mailchimp etc...) will most likely hit the inbox. An email sent from your VPS will most likely hit the SPAM folder.

Unless you know how to properly configure a mail server and maintain its reputation properly (which requires a very comprehensive plan) then getting emails delivered to the Inbox is extremely complex. Especially when sending to large groups of email addresses that are on say GMail or AOL.com.

It is definitely in your best interest to use a third party email service to send the emails out. It doesn't do any good to send emails to people who do not see them because they are in the spam folder.

Another reason for Constant Contact...ability to track what the email receiver does with the email, read, trash, click links, etc...very valuable info for you if you intend to do bulk mail.

The stats you get back from them are worth the cost.

How does CC know how to track what was really done with an email? Simple free email programs like Thunderbird can block remote script/image requests (which is the usual tracking method)...

How does CC know how to track what was really done with an email? Simple free email programs like Thunderbird can block remote script/image requests (which is the usual tracking method)...

That would be a question for them.

You can't send bulk email without help. Doesn't matter if it's vps, cloud, dedicated your never going to be able to bulk mail without incident.

Using these commercial platforms handle the issues for you.

Let us know what direction you decide to go in.

Try sendgrid.com for sending. We've found them to be cheaper and more reliable. We use our own newsletter software and use sendgrid as our smtp servers.

The only reason to us the third party Mail server to protect your mail from been Spam or spoof as the 3rd party mailing database is bigger than the normal dedicated server and they have Good Anti-virus and Spam polices firewalled on the mail so that you always gets the trusted mails and not a single Spam.

if you use the third party mail server then probablity to being spamm will increase.

Be careful while going for a mail servers! There shall be restrictions by certain of hosting providers for sending the bulk mails "all" at a time. :agree:

ConstantContact's stats system seems like a nice feature. Out of all of them, that would be your best bet, IMO. You still have the option though to just send emails through your new VPS. Some online web scripts like vBulletin and other community softwares send emails through PHP's email method, ()PHPmail (or something like that). I believe there is a feature in cPanel for mailing lists as well.

I will second the SendGrid recommendation.