ActiveCampaign, a full-featured platform for sending newsletters, is giving away $75 credits to 3 WRD readers each.

The details of this giveaway is mentioned in the bottom of this article and here is more about this exciting service:

What is ActiveCampaign?

Today, newsletters are one of the most popular ways of communicating with users/customers. Also, they are not expensive and, most importantly, they can be measured.

ActiveCampaign is a solid and hosted web application for managing subscribers, sending them newsletters and tracking the results.

It is possible to create multiple lists, view detailed information about the subscribers (like links they clicked or campaigns they opened) and even import new subscribers from many other popular web apps (Sales Force, Google Contacts, etc.), databases (MySQL-MSSQL) or with the help of a CSV-XML file.

And, for sure, the application enables us to create customized "subscribe forms" + integrate into our websites by inserting a few lines of code to our web pages.

ActiveCampaign has lots of beautifully-designed e-mail templates (cross-client compatible) to choose from or new ones can be designed with the web-based e-mail designer provided.

Once a newsletter is created, a built-in e-mail testing feature displays how it will look in popular e-mail clients like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Live Mail, Apple Mail, Lotus Notes, iPhone, etc. It even notifies you about any possible issues (including design + spam score) and shows how to fix them.

The newsletters don't have to be sent by simply clicking to "send" but can be automated in several ways:

• autoresponders (for ex: when a user subscribes send an automated welcome mail)
• date-based campaigns (sending birthday emails, etc.)
• automated triggers and subscriber actions (when user subscribes, un-subscribes, clicks a link in the e-mail..)
• RSS-based – (when new items are available in RSS, send their links/content as newsletters)

ActiveCampaign runs many checks to make sure the e-mails will be sent with success (like ensuring you have valid SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys or DKIM and managing bounces/cleaning up your lists by removing invalid e-mails).

A detailed "reporting module" brings every detail you may need to analyze the deliveries. Read/opens, number of clicks to links, un-subscribes and bounces. Also, it is possible to view the trends of days/times that the e-mails are viewed the most to decide on a better delivery date-time.

There is also the social side of every buzz (including your campaigns) on the internet and the application can display what others are talking about your campaign on Twitter and Facebook (including Facebook "likes").

ActiveCampaign has add-ons/integrations for many other apps like WordPress, Joomla, SalesForce, SugarCRM, FreshBooks, HighRise and more.

Also, a well-documented API opens the doors of any type of integrations to developers.

How to join the giveaway?

ActiveCampaign is giving away $75 credits to 3 users and to join the giveaway:

• follow @activecampaign Twitter user
• share "how you would use email marketing for you or your clients" in the comments to this post
• that's it!

P.S. The policy of ActiveCampaign is applied to the winners of the free credits.

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=2485 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Winners will be selected and announced on 4 October 2011. Good luck to everyone.

Newswall is an open source web application that can display feeds and e-mails from any number of sources.

It shows the items as blocks in a dynamical way: the browser width determines the number of blocks per row. Also, depending on the text size of a message, the block contains text only, a header image and text below or just an image.

Besides the intros, full feeds and e-mails (pop and imap are supported) can be read on a click.

The application is multilingual (several languages are already included) and its look can be customized by updating the CSS file.

Newswall is built with PHP and doesn't require any database.

Today, if not over-promoted, sharing your social activity or the content you generate in various ways is a good method to gain exposure.

WiseStamp is an add-on, with versions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock and Thunderbird, for  auto-inserting content from various resources to e-mail signatures.

Besides Thunderbird, it is compatible with the popular e-mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL.

The content inserted can be grabbed from a RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious or almost any other social network account.

The add-on is multilingual and already has support for 10+ languages.

Sendn is presenting 10+ well-designed free newsletter templates which you can find handy for using them in your own web apps, e-mail marketing processes..

Several different types of templates exist like 1/2 columns or with/without menus.

Templates come with .zip files with the image & HTML files.

They are free to be used in both personal & commercial projects.

CakeMail is presenting 15+ free newsletter templates which are suitable for simple-to-advanced deliveries.

Downloads include 1 column & 2 column templates.

Besides using them, it is nice to see how a newsletter must be from a company specialized in this area with the unsubscribe links, ability to view a web-version and the presentation.

Sending newsletters to 1000′s of users, tracking clicks, unsubscribe links, risk of sending e-mails twice? Yes, these are some concerns of newsletter management.

phplist, an open source PHP – MySQL based newsletter management application makes sending newsletters easy, professional and managable.

Some powerful features of phplist:

• No duplicate messages. No ‘forgotten’ messages.
• View and click tracking
• Templating and multiple subscribe pages
• Dynamic subscriber columns
• User specific content like "name, e-mail"
• Lists
• RSS subscription
• Scheduling
• CVS import and export
• Bounce detection and cleaning
• Auto PDF messages
• Attachments
• Throttling to prevent server overload

This open source newsletter manager can also be integrated with the current subscriber base with the built-in import feature or some coding for syncronazing databases.

With the increasing number of online web services, if you want to create an online zip and e-mail servive, Online Zip offers it for free.

Online Zip is a php script which allows users add files to a zip archive and send the archive to an e-mail address.

Probably, most of us upload photos to flickr via e-mail or once used Craigslist & auto-generated temporary e-mails of it for the listings.

If you want to build a similar e-mail to http process, there is a web service named Email2HTTP, which turns incoming email into easy-to-handle HTTP POST requests.

How does it work?

Email2HTTP works by acting as the mail server for your domain. When email arrives that matches one of your filters, it is posted to your chosen URL as if it were coming from a form on a web page. The attachments are sent as if they are file uploads on that form.

Who is it for?

Email2HTTP is for web developers who need to accept email in their web applications, but do not want to maintain their own mail servers & software.

P.S. Email2HTTP is now in the beta phase & totally free. In the future, besides the paid plans, a free plan will also be provided.

Getting your email to look great in all the major email clients can be a challenge at times, so, Campaign Monitor done the hard work for you with these 30 free e-mail templates.

They’ve tested them in all the major email clients, so add your own content and you’re all set.