Another day, another ReviewMe review to help you make money on the Internet!
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but email marketing is big business. My mailbox is continually bombarded with all sorts of newsletters, mostly telling me about cheap vacation deals and inexpensive electronics. If you’re on the other side of the campaign, though, I’m sure you’ve also realized that getting someone else to manage your email newsletters can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. While it is certainly cheaper to deal with that sort of thing yourself, it can seem like quite a daunting task. Mailium is designed to address that.
Mailium Makes Email Marketing Easy
Designed with the novice user in mind, Mailium is a completely online email marketing and newsletter sending solution created and sold by Octeth. In this way, they’re not going after the exact same market as Interspire’s SendStudio NX: Mailium is meant to be simple, and as such, it does not need to be quite as powerful as Interspire’s offering. At the same time, Mailium — at just $59 — is only a quarter of the price of SendStudio.
Installation is an absolute breeze. If you can install WordPress, you’ll have no trouble installing Mailium. It can even access your mySQL settings from within the installation tool, which again, is completely online. They promise that this program is “flexible and configurable”, and will work “on any type of server.”
There is a free seven-day trial. After entering your email address, you receive a domain specific package in your mailbox, complete with a trial license. During the trial period, you are restricted to creating a single newsletter and a distribution list of 25 addresses. If you don’t want to bother with the installation, there is also an online demo where you can fiddle with the interface.
One minor detail that you’ll want to keep in mind is that it is mailium dot net, not dot com. If you go to the latter, it redirects you to some utterly obscure Bulgarian website.
Feels Like MSN Messenger
The first impression I got of Mailium is that it is simple-looking. There are a series of icons near the top of the page, all of which remind me of the MSN and Windows Live Messenger logos. It’s a little cutesy and not so professional, but that adds to the sense that Mailium is approachable and usable by anyone. Using these icons, you navigate through the different parts of the program: overview, create new newsletter, browse newsletters, add/import subscribers, browse subscribers, member statistics, manage custom fields, export subscribers, integrate into your website, and preferences.
Each newsletter can be in HTML, plain text, or both. With the HTML newsletter, you also have the choice of using a straight text editor (code) or a WYSIWYG editor that bears some resemblance to Microsoft Word (buttons for bold, hyperlinks, etc.). The issue here is that there don’t appear to be any free templates available to use, so you will need to create a newsletter completely from scratch. This is a big downer.
On the statistics side of things, the HTML newsletters can be tracked. You have access to reports on the read ratio, number of newsletters sent, total number of subscribers, and so on.
If you run into any trouble along the way, there is a support forum, a FAQ, as well as the ability to contact the developers directly. Just bear in mind that their main office is in Istanbul, Turkey, so the time difference may affect response times. They offer two years of free support and six months of free upgrades.
Money Back Guarantee
Mailium promises to help you make money on the Internet by providing an intuitive, simple, and inexpensive way to manage your email marketing and newsletter sending campaign. It’s not the most feature-packed solution out there, but it’s easily one of the least expensive. If you’re not completely satisfied, you can get a full refund within 60 days of purchase.
One of the biggest weaknesses is that you really need to make those newsletters from scratch. There’s a good chance that the people wanting to purchase Mailium want something that is ridiculously easy to use, and as such, they are in heavy need of something even easier. Toss in some basic templates, and Mailium seems like a good value.
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