• Email Newsletters
• RSS to Email
• Track Link Clicks
• Auto-Responder that can monitor all emails sent to a specific email address you specify. Respond to all emails or only where specific keywords are found in the subject or body of an email.
• Double Opt-In, with confirmation page
• Optionally havel new subscribers receive the current newsletter after they opt-in
• Opt-Out link in emails with confirmation page
• Bounce back tracking (hard and soft bounces)
• Templates (ad based for free users, customize options for paid users)
• Detailed reporting
• Use your own email address for the from address. Get your blog/rss feed/business noticed by the whitelisting services
• Add/Remove/Edit Opt-Ins
• Add single user to list
• Export to Excel, Word, PDF, CSV
• Add more fields than just email address for collection
• Get HTML code to put on any site for any campaign
• Option of deleting or suspending Non-Deliverable Emails
• Sends out both HTML and Text emails
• Opt-out of mailings using the opt-out links in emails or reply to your mailings with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line (if you have it set to monitor an email address for this)
• Run your campaigns at any time or schedule them to run daily, weekly, monthly, once a year or on a specific date you specify

I am also going to add a business tier for the companies that would like additional logins and a more flexible opportunity for customization on templates and getting advertisements into the emails that go out from the free users.

One other thing I am toying with is for paid members having the ability to do something similar to a pay-per-view type thing but for blog content in the free users email kind of like a ten random blogs that would be displayed at the bottom of free user emails and would of course be completely random on every campaign that went out there would be different blog exerpts for every email. Paid users can fund some money into the site for their ad campaigns and buy slots on emails. This is just a thought and with having free users and paid users it could help many users grow their newsletters without breaking their bank accounts like the other sites I have signed up for and tested in the last couple weeks.

As always feedback is always welcome and lets get the word out.

Open/Read Stats

Contrary to what other email sites say, this is not accurate. The auto e mailers cannot get any accurate receipts for many reasons. Some email clients cannot handle that request for one and if you’re like me you just plain turn it off. Since requesting a receipt from email clients is pointless you could send a tracking image. In this approach what happens is when an email goes out there is a small transparent image that is referenced and each time a server request is made for that image you can have code update a database for whatever campaign email sent it out. The problem with that way is that spammers have exploited that method and a lot of email clients now look for those type of images and will not reference it.

I have spent the last two days playing around with some asp and php code and can get my gmail account to call the function correctly but in my Outlook it comes up as a missing image. For this reason I will not be claiming to be able to give  open/read count stats for this new site. Not saying it won’t happen in the future but not right off the bat. I do not like to mislead any customer or claim a service I cannot give accurately. One thing that will help show open/read count stats will be the click through stats. This by no means will be accurate for counting open/reads but will show you every time a link was clicked and what that link was. I will also incorporate ip tracking so it would show you how many times an ip clicked a certain link or what links a certain ip clicked to help show what stories are doing well.

White Listing Services

These companies are just outrageously expensive. If you look up email white listing you will find a company called Return Path. Apparently people pay them even though they charge an astronomical fee. Since I don’t want to make them any more money than they already have by placing a link to their site here’s a screen shot of their pricing plan. (which by the way you have to do a search for their prices on Google to even get to this page) Notice how they want an application fee and large annual fees.

There are a few ways to get white listed and thanks to www.emailwhitelisting.com for the tutorials on how to add email addresses to you email clients white list.  In the IZEA blog I read a comment that said ” Very bad news..I made a list with 55000 people… May i ask how much money is need that the service can be live?” Based on his list alone if he sent out an email once a week it would cost $500 for an application fee and $1375 a year. That is $156.25 a month just for their white listing service and assuming he only sends out 1 email a week.

So I’m faced with a couple options on this one and they are to have the emails come from E-Blastz.com directly or put it on the user and have it come from their own email address. I will be looking into this further in the next couple days and to help me out here’s a poll for some input.Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Update

Ok so Zookoda has not approved my sender details and probably won’t since they are shutting down so if you guys would be so kind as to give me a few links for me to sign up to your email list so I can get a picture of the email layout when they are sent that would help a lot.

Also if anyone has feature requests or name suggestions please feel free to leave them here as well.

Here’s what I’m thinking so far.

They way I’m thinking I would need to structure this would be a three tier account structure.

Tier one would be free users. The way this would work would be basic with some other ads and basic templates and a powered by logo on emails sent out.

Tier two I’m thinking $14.95 a month and would give customizable templates and take away the ads in the emails.

Tier three would be $24.95 a month and would do tier two’s functions and also instead of the powered by logo for this new site it would have a customizable logo that would show your sites information.

Also in tier two and three we could even have customized opt in and out web pages that take away ads and shows your info instead of the normal powered by logos.

Let me know if this sounds good. I also have thought of a name for this site. If their are any other suggestions before I purchase the domain name for this please comment them. Also make sure to click the share this link to get this out everywhere to let people know about Zookoda’s shut down.