Best way to mass email for a volunteer society

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timmmay

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# 177537 5-Aug-2015 21:21

My mother in law needs to email several hundred people a few times a year as part of a volunteer art society email newsletter. She was going to use her Hotmail account and just BCC everyone, with a backup option of doing the same thing with the email I host from her on her domain (HostGator). I think there are two problems with either approach:
- Spam filters could bin most of the emails
- It could mark her account as spam and have it closed

Is there a decent, free way to do this? It must be mother in law proof, because I don't want to spend hours and hours working on this. I could for example install email list manager software on her domain, but the free stuff tends to be complex. They just want something simple - perhaps some kind of proxy that accepts a single email and distributes to a predefined list?

Oh, and of course, it needs to be free since it's a volunteer society.

3g

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# 1359708 5-Aug-2015 22:16

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We use SendGrid for a lot of our commercial email and I see they have a free option.
Includes ability to send 12,000 per month, with the option to create templates, upload lists of users and more.

https://sendgrid.com/free

Geektastic

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# 1359715 5-Aug-2015 22:20

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Mailchimp?

marpada

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# 1359722 5-Aug-2015 22:35

+1 to both Sendgrid and Mailchimp :)

mattwnz

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# 1359762 6-Aug-2015 00:05

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Mailchimp hands down. The simplist system out there, and free if your list is small.

jarledb

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# 1359763 6-Aug-2015 00:12

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MailChimp, for sure. They make sure the people using the list does not spam (so their servers are less likely to be spam filtered), and they have a very good system for creating emails. Both as HTML and as plain text (or both).

2000 list members and up to 12000 sent emails a month for free (so if you have a list of 2000 recipients, you can email them 6 times in a month), if you are ok with showing their logo in the bottom of your email (thats a pretty good deal if you ask me).

You can do advanced things like A/B test, tracking opens and link clicks etc, but its still really easy to get started with a simple email campaign.

Jarle on Twitter - Senson NZ - WordPress experts

grant_k

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# 1359766 6-Aug-2015 00:43

I've been sending out newsletters to members of our Non-Profit Society for 4 years now using MailChimp and it continues to amaze me that such a great service is totally free if you fit within the constraints mentioned above by Jarledb. The way it can track Opens, Clicks and more is brilliant and lets you keep tabs on how successful each newsletter is.

A month ago I started using it to send out our yearly statements for subscription renewals. By using Mail Merge fields, I was able to personalise it as much as I needed, complete with balance brought forward from last year, subs owing for this year, and prompt payment discount. All so much easier and cheaper than using an accounting system, or any other way I could think of.

robjg63

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# 1359789 6-Aug-2015 07:53

+1 on the mail chimp.
Easy to use.
Users can manage their own subscription details.
Free account allows huge numbers of emails/subscribers.
Easy to design your own mailouts.
It just works.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

timmmay

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# 1359791 6-Aug-2015 07:59

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MailChimp is the answer - thanks all!