Looking for a small library newsletter mailer
November 28, 2022 1:24 PM Subscribe
I'm setting up the mass mailer for a 3000 person email list that belongs to a small library. Email goes out about twice a week. There's no way they can handle a sendy server of their own and the Easysendy evaluation has gone disastrously. Mailchimp seems to be the default here but the cost is prohibitive. How do you handle newsletters for your small, poor, technologically challenged organization?
Best answer: I currently use MailJet for a weekly newsletter with about 1,300 contacts. They have an easy online email creator that lets me design the email and then kick it out. (I really just duplicate the previous one and change the section headers and text as needed.)
MailJet uses a emails/month pricing chart. 3k emails 2x a week will fall under their 50,000 email/month tier that runs about $35/mo for the "Essential" plan. This plan also lets me completely hide the fact that the email is coming from MailJet. The "Premium" tier at $50/mo has additional stuff for marketing and analytics that I suspect that you will not need nor care to pay for. Mailjet also offers a 20% discount for verified no-profits which should include a local library. That should bump the price down to $28/mo for the basic plan.
This is cheaper than MailChimp that starts at $60/mo for 5,000 contacts. ($35/mo for 2,500 contacts.)
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 1:49 PM on November 28, 2022
MailJet uses a emails/month pricing chart. 3k emails 2x a week will fall under their 50,000 email/month tier that runs about $35/mo for the "Essential" plan. This plan also lets me completely hide the fact that the email is coming from MailJet. The "Premium" tier at $50/mo has additional stuff for marketing and analytics that I suspect that you will not need nor care to pay for. Mailjet also offers a 20% discount for verified no-profits which should include a local library. That should bump the price down to $28/mo for the basic plan.
This is cheaper than MailChimp that starts at $60/mo for 5,000 contacts. ($35/mo for 2,500 contacts.)
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 1:49 PM on November 28, 2022
Best answer: I use Buttondown and can confirm that it's good. You can email to request a nonprofit discount. It's owned and run by an individual human and I can confirm that he replies to email.
posted by brainwane at 2:30 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by brainwane at 2:30 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I have to admit the individual human part of Buttondown worries me, especially as they claim 25,000+ users. The organization I'm setting this up for is not technically sophisticated and may end up needing more support than can be provided by one person with that kind of load.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:16 PM on November 28, 2022
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:16 PM on November 28, 2022
I emailed him once and asked to see if he had a backup plan if something happened to him and he said that he does.
posted by aniola at 5:31 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 5:31 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have had a "everything Just Works" kind of experience with Buttondown.
posted by aniola at 5:33 PM on November 28, 2022
posted by aniola at 5:33 PM on November 28, 2022
Most of the traditional bulk email systems out there (MailJet, SendInBlue, SendGrid, Constant Contact, Buttondown, etc) often have a free tier that you can use to get started.
It may be worth looking at the estimated costs for your setup (3,000 contacts and and 30,000 emails/month) and then creating a free tier account for the top 2 or 3. You can then see how easy it is to do things like bulk import the existing mailing list to a new one, send an email to a small test group, and do other things like setup a proper "subscribe to our mailing list" form on a website. Take what you learned from the EasySendy trial and see how the others will work. (Note that the branding should go away once you uplift to the paid tier. )
The user interface for creating an email vary from platform to platform. Some are simple with a Markup only style interface that sometimes can confound non-technical folks and can blowup when you want to do something like a two column layout or insert a photo. Others are pure html that offer ultimate flexibility, but only if you can already understand the inter-relationship between the various html tags. Some have really slick WISIWIG editors that you can drop anybody in front of and they will be cranking out a newsletter in no time.
I should note that you are requesting a system that will send close to half a million emails per year. This is not a small amount. So stuff like proper unsubscribe and spam flag handling is going to be rather important. If you want the email to come from your domain with an email like newsletter@MyLocalLibrary.org, then somebody with access to the back end DNS servers will need to work with whoever you pick to setup the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records if you want those messages to have any chance of ever hitting their inbox. Otherwise the entire thing will get relegated to the spam folder and that is not where you want to be.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 6:28 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
It may be worth looking at the estimated costs for your setup (3,000 contacts and and 30,000 emails/month) and then creating a free tier account for the top 2 or 3. You can then see how easy it is to do things like bulk import the existing mailing list to a new one, send an email to a small test group, and do other things like setup a proper "subscribe to our mailing list" form on a website. Take what you learned from the EasySendy trial and see how the others will work. (Note that the branding should go away once you uplift to the paid tier. )
The user interface for creating an email vary from platform to platform. Some are simple with a Markup only style interface that sometimes can confound non-technical folks and can blowup when you want to do something like a two column layout or insert a photo. Others are pure html that offer ultimate flexibility, but only if you can already understand the inter-relationship between the various html tags. Some have really slick WISIWIG editors that you can drop anybody in front of and they will be cranking out a newsletter in no time.
I should note that you are requesting a system that will send close to half a million emails per year. This is not a small amount. So stuff like proper unsubscribe and spam flag handling is going to be rather important. If you want the email to come from your domain with an email like newsletter@MyLocalLibrary.org, then somebody with access to the back end DNS servers will need to work with whoever you pick to setup the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records if you want those messages to have any chance of ever hitting their inbox. Otherwise the entire thing will get relegated to the spam folder and that is not where you want to be.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 6:28 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Okay, thanks. I appreciate everyone sharing their experiences.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:16 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:16 AM on November 30, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by aniola at 1:48 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]