Email Newsletter Campgain Agents sucks, Solution?

The Problem with Newsletter Services

Newsletter agents

if you have been in the marketing industry or even having some sort of website or business where you want to send weekly or bi-weekly newsletter to your audience/members is not quite as easy as it may look.

So whats wrong?

well running services like Mailchimp or any other newsletter service out there can be tricky, the idea of them is super cool and useful for businesses that want an easy out-the-shelf solution. Mailchimp offers some free tiers as well but for someone that has a large amount of audience then this free service is no use! which is the main reason I'm writing this blog.

Why?

why am I writing this non-sense? well firstly I came across this challenge because I was trying to find a nice newsletter and campaign solution for DCU Solar Racing. and it wasn't the easiest thing to figure out, I'm looking for something easy to use, offers some great features and supports multiple newsletter lists (more on that later) and the most important part is, being a free service. as a student-led project, our budget is not enough to pay for such extra services that we can have for free if we research them properly!

The Solution

You may ask, what is the solution? well considering I have my own Homelab, I was like why don't I just look for easy to use Open Source service? and that's exactly what I did.

I started by researching google and reading few articles and people's opinions and experience, but was getting nowhere since everyone had different opinions. so I went to a page where it lists all the open source projects called Awesome Selfhosted.

I started looking through the lists on the website until I found Listmonk.

Listmonk is Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager, providing a nice modern UI (which ticks few of my boxed) and seemed to provide everything I needed.

Hosting Listmonk

so after looking through the listmonk website and realizing that it might be the perfect service I need, I proceeded to go to their docs page and finding the one about Docker Compose because that's what my homelab runs.

all I needed was copy paste the docker-compose file and change few lines and configurations and spin up the container, and voila it worked! so now the next step was to go to listmonk and configure the client to work as intended

coming back to my "multiple lists" point, so why is that important to me or to us? well running a student-led organization trying to build and race solar powered car is not that easy, and having sponsors requires some efforts to keep them in the loop and updated on the project progress, which is why listmonk is perfect for this, I created a private list where I listed all out sponsor's email addresses and gave each one a name (it also supports custom attributes) and boom it just works!

TL:DR

self-hosting is awesome and can save you extra money for other things, also do your research on each topic and figure out the best solution for you, don't just fine something that looks cool and pay for it, do research, look for people's opinions and see what the market has to offer.