Email marketing is an effective strategy for promoting your brand, product, and services. Many website owners use established email marketing services such as MailChimp.
There are some drawbacks to using hosted email marketing services to manage your promotions.
Firstly, you need to abide by their rules and guidelines. For example, some services have rules on what you can promote and what you cannot promote.
Secondly, many hosted services have restrictions in place for importing subscribers in order to protect their delivery rates. Therefore, if you are moving to a new hosted service, you may be forced to make all subscribers opt-in to your newsletter again or at the very least email them and ask them if they want to opt-out. Both of these scenarios can lose you subscribers.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, hosted email marketing services can be very expensive. A service such as Aweber charges $49 per month for up to 5,000 subscribers, $69 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers, and $149 per month for 10,001 to 25,000 subscribers.
In contrast, using a self-hosted email marketing solution and sending emails through an SMTP relay service such as Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent. Switching to a self-hosted email marketing platform could save a business thousands of dollars every year which is why so many people are trying out self-hosted email marketing solutions.
This page lists many great self-hosted email marketing scripts and solutions that you can use.
 | Dada MailA versatile self-hosted solution that supports emailing via SendMail, SMTP, or Amazon SES. It offers detailed analytics, custom fields, a mass mailing monitor, and more. A free version is available that offers three lists up to 1,000 subscribers. The more practical option is to purchase the pro version as that unlocks all features, allows an unlimited number of subscribers and gives priority support. The pro version retails at $39.95 per year or a one-off fee of $89.95. |
 | nuevoMailerA feature-rich self-hosted email marketing solution that retails from £122. The software supports all types of email marketing campaigns and features an opt-in form builder, landing pages, autoresponders, email triggers, list segmentation and more. A host of personalisation options are available for newsletters and you can send emails using multiple SMTP servers with load balancing and rotation, PowerMTA, Amazon SES or any local MTA. Extensive reports and charts for your campaigns are also provided. |
 | OemproComprehensive marketing software that has many advanced features. A standard license for one user costs $245. |
 | phpListAn open source newsletter and email marketing application. It can be used to send millions of emails and features statistics, subscriber management, template management, and more. A hosted version of phpList is available at phpList.com for a monthly fee. |
 | SendySendy is a self-hosted newsletter application that allows you to send emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It has a lot of great features such as graphical reports, custom fields, automatic bounce handling, and much more. Sendy retails at a one time fee of $59. A WordPress widget called Sendy Widget Pro is available for $16 that helps you integrate Sendy with a WordPress website. |
 | UltraMailerAn emailing solution for Windows users that works with Amazon SES. It boasts over 320 HTML templates for newsletters and a built-in email harvester. Tracking options are available for clicks too. A two year license retails at $125. I recommend downloading the demo to test the application before upgrading to the full version. |