Email marketing question

[srobb]

I am tinkering with SugarCRM for my real estate business and it looks like it will work on the CRM front but I am struggling with the campaign module and if it will suit my needs or not. I have a few groups of contacts split up between short term buyers, long term buyers, short term sellers and long term sellers, as well as past clients, and then people that get random updates on the market. I have a dozen emails for each group (one to be sent each month). That means that I have about 5 different emails that get sent out each month – one to each group.

Can Sugar be used to easily set this up?

Then when I get a new client, I want to be able to start them up on the newsletters as well, but starting from letter number 1, not whatever month they happen to get added to the group in.

Does this make sense?

[salesagility]

Very straightforward ... create subscription lists for each group and subscribe the contacts to the appropriate subscription list(s).

Create Email templates as appropriate, then when you're ready to mail ... select the template, add the subscription list(s) ... it really is as easy as that

[srobb]

Can it all be set to be automated? I see that there is a "Start date and time" in the email marketing section. If I set that to a date and the system processes the nightly/daily email sends, will it send out on that date?

It seems hard to organize having a lot of email templates unless I am doing it wrong. If I have 50-80 templates, they always all show up in one list correct? There is no way to have them in folders of some nature and then sub categories. The way it is set up now if you create an "email marketing" and go to select a template, you will have to scroll through all the templates - which theoretically could be hundreds.

The design and implementation of many of these crms and emailers seem very clunky to me for some reason.