Choosing the right email newsletter delivery service for your organization takes some careful consideration. There are a wide array of service providers out there and it can be overwhelming to try to pick out the right one to meet your needs.

ONE/Northwest published a review of email newsletter tools to help guide our client organizations through this decision. What we've learned since then is that two services, Vertical Response and WhatCounts, map to the vast majority of use cases that our clients have.

Each email newsletter service has a certain set of strengths and weaknesses that you should be aware of before making a final decision. Below are the high-level differences between Vertical Response and WhatCounts.  You may also want to look at our Email Service Provider Comparison Matrix for more information.

• Vertical Response can be easily integrated with Salesforce.
  
• WhatCounts offers a Salesforce integration, however ONE/Northwest no longer provides consulting services for pairing these two platforms due to the extreme complexity of the integration.
• Vertical Response is cheaper than WhatCounts if you're sending fewer than 50,000 emails per month.
  
• WhatCounts has profile management which allows for running multiple lists with the ability to opt-out of each list individually. As of July 2008, Vertical Response does not allow per-list opt-outs. All unsubscribes are global (i.e. for all of your lists).
  
• Vertical Response accounts have only one login per organizational account (unless you're using the Salesforce integration). With WhatCounts you can create many user logins for the same organizational account.
• The user interface of Vertical Response is more user friendly than it is for WhatCounts, which makes the system easier to learn.
  
• In WhatCounts, you can dynamically add content to template based on data in a subscriber's record. Vertical Response does not have this kind of "mail merge"-like feature.
  
  

To summarize: Vertical Response is very easy to use and very inexpensive -- in fact it's free if you send less than 10,000 emails a month. WhatCounts costs a bit more, but offers some powerful features that are not available in Vertical Response.

Adopting the Vertical Response integration with Salesforce also deserves consideration. We've uncovered some subtle tips, tricks and tradeoffs about Vertical Response + Salesforce which our database project manager Steve Andersen outlines on his blog.