We're a small design agency - I use it in an attempt to save us from a lot of headaches.

It's become apparent in the last few months that a lot of our clients have gotten on board with some *really* bad email campaign managers. When they come to us asking for a nice email design, we tell them sure - but you'll have to have an HTML developer on staff in order to send these out each month. That's when we slip in a mention about MailBuild and hope they take the bait :)

The one stumbling block, and the reason I suspect they're sticking with these horrible ECM's, is their pricing model. Taking Constant Contact as an example - they could send out one email a week to a list of 5,000 people for a total monthly cost of $50. The same sort of activity with MailBuild would be $200. So while I'm very quick to recommend MB to solve their problem, I lose most people when it comes down to the numbers.

Those sort of usage statistics are fairly conservative in our experience with clients. I don't know if subscription-based or alternative pricing models are on the horizon, but if it's something you guys could swing then I'd have nothing holding me back from recommending you as a one-stop email marketing solution.

I'd second the pricing model issues - we've run into this

Secondly for Mailbuild we have some savvy clients that would want to upload their own templates once we train them on the tags etc but we don't have the ability to open that up to clients that would be useful.

Having more than one repeater also useful

Otherwise great product - worked very well for us.

We are a small design agency and have seen good success with selling MailBuild as an add-on to a website project. We charge an upfront fee for designing the initial template and walking them through the process of how to effectively use email marketing to support their strategic goals. We charge extra for extra templates and for website integration.

Our clients are fine with the pricing model but most of them of them are not familiar with the other available options.

I third the pricing model. Unfortunately, email has become a commodity that the bigger guys with the bigger budgets can simply price chop to death as they live on pure volume. Pricing is def an issue.

I fourth the price issue. What Brandon says is dead on and what I run into all the time. He mentions constant contact, a service that gives me nightmares. One thing they do is that they provide these ridiculous templates and if you want a custom template they hit you for $600 and they have to build them. So much for $9.95 a month.

However, the problem with your pricing model is that you are competing with the designer for the client's budget. I can actually put more design fees in my pocket by using these cheap services, and they pay me to do custom campaigns for the client. I would prefer to use your service, but when they tell me the budget is X dollars I have to decide do I want that money to go to me or to delivery fees. If I had a fixed price for your service, even a higher price, I could make a compelling case to the client to switch because I could absorb the additional cost of your service for a superior platform. If you offered a fixed monthly pricing option, but at a higher price from these usual suspects and stayed focused on the designer market. you would do well. Of course, i am sure you already do. So, you would do even better.

I dream of a day where I can offer campaign monitor and mailbuild with a fixed monthly price option. I have tested all these usual suspects and you guys win by a mile no joke. Unfortunately, most customer could care less about the elegance of the solution. As Joe states, email is a commodity.

The other thing I think you guys need to add is an autoresponder for drip campaigns.

Well said. The customer really doesn't buy an elegant solution as much as the designers in the world do. While I think your customer is designers, think of your designers customers needs being met through your designers and everyone wins.

Thanks for the feedback guys, we love to hear it and we are all listening.

Personally, I like the current pricing (only paying when sending), it's easier to sell to small businesses. I get and hear what some of the others are saying that send large volumes frequently, yes it would really add up quickly. Maybe it may be possible to have the best of both worlds - having the option (per client) to select Pay Per Send (as normal) or pay a Monthly Fee.

i use mailbuild to send an email contest for my client. Like viral marketing, the more they forward the email, the closer they win the prize. it works.

Mailbuild can track down how forward the most and win the prize.

Walter, I certainly agree. You can see my other thoughts above, but I would defintely keep the pay as you go plan as an option. It is really good for the small business that is just starting and building a list and may have only a few hundred names and do not send frequently. The pay as you go model certainly works best for them. My belief is to offer a different level of service we can graduate them to without switching to one of these other services and then have to reconfirm the addresses.

We're a website design and internet marketing firm that deals mostly with small businesses. The pricing isn't so much an issue for us - we have some clients who have abandoned Constant Contact altogether. We charge a flat rate for set up, and provide an estimate on creating a template.

Sometimes, we have clients who put out their own newsletter but also have heavily designed one-off pieces. It would be nice to be able to send a mailing using MailBuild but not requiring any of the tags to be entered.

I'd also like to second the "more than one repeater" request. And sender keys - that's really killing one of our clients.

Yes - two options - monthly fee structure competitive to the marketplace and pay-as-you-go. There will always be two types of senders - frequent (who don't care for the pay-as-you-go model) and infrequent (who prefer pay-as-you-go).

Mailbuilds business would take off if these options existed.

We have tested lot of mail solutions, and mailbuild rocks - the others sucks!
The easiness of the solution wins, clients want to be independent and send out campaigns without being dependent on consultants/designers..

We service, small and real big clients in Denmark. Started out selling this service to existing clients, but as the word is spreding we are now getting new clients contacting us on the background of this elegant mail solution.

The pricing model is not to much a issue yet. We charge for template development and not to much dependent on markup fee.

But a few features would make this great service even better:

Clients:
* More flexible repeating elements
* Let clients change background images
* Flexible pricing model, month fee, bulk e-mail discount

For us as service provider:

* Better way to display our clients use, in a dashboard when we log in, last login, count of drafts, and earned markup on month to date
* Convert css on import to inline style, as in campaign monitor

Keep up the great work, you guys rocks!

Dana brings up a valid point and one I've always wanted…the ability to send a campaign without requiring any tags except for the opt out tag. Why? Because it would allow me to use both templated campaigns and those that aren't from one service, MailBuild.

And of course, multiple repeaters. Not having them is killing the ability to design more robust newsletters.

Lastly, I hate feeling like MailBuild is the red-headed stepchild. Campaign Monitor gets all the great features first with some not even making it to MailBuild.

I agree, the competitors offering a monthly fee structure win with clients that send a certain amount each month.
Maybe the immediate solution would be for a monthly quantity discount that is competitive and comparitive with the monthly plans from these competitors?

That would give our clients the best of both Worlds, and retain the pay-as-you-go model.
Should also be easier for MB devs to implement - like today?! ;-)

I also mirror the desires form others here in that MailBuild has fallen well behind with features found in both Campaign Monitor and competitors products.

The tags issues should be solved with simplicity in mind for the end-user. Have an single pane WYSIWYG editor that has a dropdown list of all the tags ready to insert wherever the user requires?
In other words, allow the clients to create and change everything in a simple manner similar to as if they were using MS Word.No need for designers to worry that this would take away their template designing business - clients will always need professionals.

Thanks again for all the comments. Don't worry, there are plenty of improvements planned for MailBuild users, you won't be left behind.

Having said that, we also don't intend to compete for the dubious honour of cheapest email solution in all cases - that's a battle we are unlikely to win, and does not end well for the competitors.

We do take all your feedback into account though, and do understand the need to remain competitive from a pricing perspective.

I have to agree with the others who have mentioned the lack of many features already found in campaign monitor - especially the lack of many of the API features...

For me, being able to better intergrate mailbuild with my own backend systems is most important - dragging out lists of campaigns sent, number of subsribers and many of the reports would be great.

Matthew, thanks for chiming in on the pricing issue - it's very reassuring to hear that you guys are at least open to the idea.

The feedback so far sounds unanimous that if you offered the alternative monthly pricing structure (in addition to the pay as you go) that we'd all jump on it in a heartbeat. And please don't misconstrue the need as us being cheap - we fully expect you to be NOT be the least expensive solution out there. We just need a way to attempt to close this huge gap that we're facing now in trying to sell the service to our clients.

I would never expect you to get down to Constant Contact - level pricing... your service is so much better that me (and my clients to a certain degree) would expect it to cost more per month. But just having that as an option would make a world of difference in liberating our clients from the hell created by other ECM's.

We are a web design business and we LOVE MailBuild. We have set up a standalone site to service our clients (a newer funkier design is on the way). We have some suggestions from a back-end perspective....

* API - Yes agree with Dave, the API could do so much more, in particular allow us to sign up clients with our own default settings and default template(s).

* Add in the Spam Test tool into MailBuild (I know we can go into CM to do it but hey, we are lazy!)

Other than that... very happy, keep up the brilliant work.