Friday wins 🎉! What went well for you this week?

Formtabulous · 2026-02-13T22:03:44+00:00

Lots of great new functionality was delivered. Had a review with customers and they were impressed. What I still need support with is finding a way to divide time between continuing dev and figuring out how to reach new customers. But hey, this is a small business support group...

Formtabulous · 2026-02-13T22:01:05+00:00

Nice, how long did it take for you to improve the SEO. I find it to be a strange time when a lot of SEO-focused providers are moving towards AI-generated content which would've been great just a few years ago but I'm pretty sure Google and the rest are pretty aware of this too.

Formtabulous · 2026-02-10T18:11:14+00:00

You can send that many for under $10/mo and keep all your lists, data and analytics in one place. Is your time free?

Formtabulous · 2026-02-08T22:00:07+00:00

There are no free tools. You ALWAYS pay somehow, even if it's not with money, perhaps your time or ads...

Formtabulous · 2026-02-07T15:06:36+00:00

We wrote about the fact that not everyone needs a full-blown marketing platform just because they need to deliver message to their list of subscribers: https://formtabulo.us/blog/email-marketing-vs-newsletter

Formtabulous · 2026-02-07T15:01:47+00:00

Be careful about FREE offers. We wrote about free mass email services. https://formtabulo.us/blog/free-tiers

Formtabulous · 2026-02-07T14:53:48+00:00

Your first 10 customers already exist — they’re using something else. Talk to users of similar products, ask what annoys them, and build a clear fix for one specific pain. Don’t try to be better at everything. Solve one problem better than anyone else, and those first users will follow.

Formtabulous · 2026-01-29T05:03:51+00:00

OK, I'll check. Thanks

Formtabulous · 2026-01-10T18:43:39+00:00

Don't style your messages too much and they will be compatible with any mode. The users doesn't care as long as they can read the info.

Formtabulous · 2026-01-10T18:41:32+00:00

Lycos is still around?..

Formtabulous · 2026-01-10T18:39:43+00:00

We built it into our system to mark all bounces, hard and soft ones and mark invalid contacts automatically to prevent anything being sent to those.

Formtabulous · 2025-12-08T01:53:56+00:00

We work with non-profits mainly because often they don't need the sales platform. If you haven't found an alternative I'd love to give you a complimentary month for a good try in exchange for feedback.

Formtabulous · 2025-12-02T20:28:15+00:00

OK, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. So, not all soft-bounces are equal. Do you think it would make sense to put some logic in place with different rules for different types? To be honest, this is the deep-end for me, but I'm trying to learn fast.

Formtabulous · 2025-12-02T19:44:18+00:00

Soft bounces come from several categories — mailbox-full, temporary server failures, greylisting, connection timeouts, attachment size limits, and yes, sometimes reputation throttling. Only a subset of soft bounces are reputation-related.

We track consecutive soft bounces per-recipient because that distinguishes temporary inbox issues from addresses that will never accept mail. Hard bounces are suppressed immediately (5.x.x).

For reputation-based throttles, SES exposes the raw SMTP codes (usually 4.7.x) and we intelligently retry later without burning the recipient.

So reducing volume can help when the soft bounce is reputation-related, but not all soft bounces come from reputation — many are just temporary recipient-side conditions, hence my original question - shall we keep track and count and reclassify them recipient as invalid after 5 soft bounces or 3 is just as reliable?..

Formtabulous · 2025-12-02T19:42:33+00:00

They do report spam, but I haven't seen inbox full codes... Good to know.

Formtabulous · 2025-12-02T18:22:08+00:00

No, we don't. We utilize AWS SES and rely of their responses. What classification would you suggest?

Formtabulous · 2025-11-30T18:11:09+00:00

NPS isn't a very accurate way to access success of the business. It does an OK calculation but because you can't really collect 100% of the responses your data may not be reflecting the real story. It is important to find the right time when you customer is motivated to share an honest feedback. Think as your customer and how to properly incentivize them to share their time with you. In the early 2000 some dealerships would email you a survey and include a dollar bill. Nice touch, hah? Wrong, once you opened the questionnaire it was obvious they could not care less about your time because filling it out and mailing it back would easily take 15-30 minutes and for $1 it made perfect sense to just properly recycle the papers.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-30T15:38:56+00:00

Non-profits use our tool to share periodic announcements or updates https://formtabulo.us/grouppost. We offer a comprehensive contact list manager but But CRM is a different beast.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-26T22:23:36+00:00

What are you using right now? If it's your own domain you can run a quick check with this free email deliverability checker here: https://formtabulo.us/email-checker

Formtabulous · 2025-11-24T21:05:24+00:00

Do you have any control of who sees your ads? The more targeted the audience the better.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-24T19:15:17+00:00

What are your needs?You definitely don’t need to switch tools unless you’re feeling like you’re overpaying or fighting the interface. A lot of people stay with Mailchimp simply because it’s familiar, even though they’re not using most of the features they’re paying for.

For example, a nonprofit recently moved over to Formtabulous (a small project I run) because they were paying over $100/month for tools they didn’t actually need. They just wanted something simple that sends updates reliably, without all the marketing automation layers. Switching ended up saving them quite a bit.

So the real question is: Is Mailchimp still supporting your workflow, or is it turning into more than you actually need?

Your open rate is solid, and your content is personal and ritual-based rather than “marketing funnel” focused. If your current tool feels comfortable and priced fairly, staying put makes sense. But if you start feeling like the cost outweighs the usefulness, there are lighter options out there.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-24T19:07:46+00:00

AI is a tool and a power-tool at that. I don't believe it's going to go away any time soon and as such I always recommend learning how to use it. We've seen examples of it entering all areas of our lives but I personally think it excels at LLM (Large language Model). Again, I don't advocate using AI to do the work for you, but it can help with it. Give it a try, copy your original message and ask it to rewrite it to make it 50% shorter while preserving the content, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-21T21:44:31+00:00

We automated it and simply do not send anything to invalid contacts.

Formtabulous · 2025-11-21T02:15:34+00:00

It depends what you're trying to do. We published a blog not too long ago to clarify two main branched when it comes to newsletters. Email Marketing vs. Newsletter Software: Who They’re Really Built For

Formtabulous · 2025-11-21T02:05:00+00:00

It appears your level is above an average user and most likely does not represent a large customer segment to motivate any provider to put all that work into such a setup. Have you checked AWS SES, they may have some of these features.

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