I have a monthly newsletter that I send out via email. It's been functional, but very low tech - just text, send from my gmail account, contacts simply BCC'd. I decided I finally wanted to send out one of those pretty HTML emails that I get from other dancers and companies, and since my advertising budget is small I started looking into free options. I found Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailChimp, which is free up to 500 contacts and the first 3,000 emails. Since I have a little less than 200 addresses on my list and only send the one email a month, that should last me for quite a while.
The templates are decent, although it took me some tweaking to find one that worked with my usual content. They have a lot of reporting - bounces (hard & soft), opens, link click-throughs, etc. And of course they take care of unsubscribing requests and cleaning up your list of obsolete email addresses.
Thanks for posting this! I use constantcontact at the moment, and it works fine, but MailChimp looks like the cheaper/more flexible option at the moment.
__________________ www.khalida.biz Bellydancer of the world 2007
Oh looks nice. I would like to leave Bravenet, but I need to see if it is worth it first. Can you write your own html on mailchimp?
Yes - when you start a campaign, you can either choose one of their templates (which you can then tweak and save as your own template), or import/paste HTML code.
I'd want to see what new emails look like in an email agent that doesn't allow html. I'd also want to see what it looks like with pictures turned off. So far, I'm sticking with text for maximum readability. PS: see below, html emails are more likely to be identified as spam.
From wikipedia: HTML allows for a link to have a different target than the link's text. This can be used in phishing attacks, in which users are fooled into believing that a link points to the website of an authoritative source (such as a bank), visiting it, and unintentionally revealing personal details (like bank account numbers) to a scammer.
If an e-mail contains web bugs (inline content from an external server, such as a picture), the server can alert a third party that the e-mail has been opened. This is a potential privacy risk, revealing that an e-mail address is real (so that it can be targeted in the future) and revealing when the message was read. For this reason, some e-mail clients do not load external images until requested to by the user.
During periods of increased network threats, the US Department of Defense converts all incoming HTML e-mail to text e-mail.[15][DOD bars use of HTML e-mail, Outlook Web Access dead link]
The multipart type is intended to show the same content in different ways, but this is sometimes abused; some e-mail spam takes advantage of the format to trick spam filters into believing that the message is legitimate. They do this by including innocuous content in the text part of the message and putting the spam in the HTML part (which is what displays to the user).
Most e-mail spam is sent in HTML for these reasons, so spam filters sometimes give higher spam scores to HTML messages.
I'd want to see what new emails look like in an email agent that doesn't allow html. I'd also want to see what it looks like with pictures turned off. So far, I'm sticking with text for maximum readability. PS: see below, html emails are more likely to be identified as spam.
Each email you create also sends a plain text version for those who do not have HTML enables in their email client. You can go in and edit the plain text verision as much as you like without changing the HTML version. You can also just send a plain text version if you like - you don't have to use HTML to use the service and get the reporting.
I have images turned off in my email client by default, and the email I sent is missing the header with images turned off.
As far as the spam issue, this is MailChimp's page on how they attempt to combat your emil from being marked as spam or deleted Send Email Campaigns | MailChimp.com
I was debating for quite a while whether or not I wanted to invest in an email service. When I ran an Arthur Murray Studio, I used Constant Contact a lot and loved it. In fact, we were one of their featured success stories in their own newsletter and our story was sent to over 2million users.
However, for the Intensive, we already have well over 500 people on our mailing list, so it means a substantial monthly cost. Additonally, I'm not really sure that HTML newsletters are the way to go any more.
There are lots of folks who get their emails via their cell phones. I do. Even with text versions are so long and the content so buried in the structure of the email that I dread getting emails from Constant Contact, Mailchip, or iContact.
So for the moment, we are opting to forego the expense of a monthly service and use facebook, twitter, and myspace to make our announcements and drive folks to our site. I am able to track our incomming traffic via our site statistics, which is sufficient.
It's possible that this works better for us because we are an annual event and not necessarily teaching regular classes. Most of our announcements are short and sweet. Mostly we just want to continue to be fresh in people's minds.
If you are going to use a service, I've heard positive things about all of them, but MailChimp does seem to be more affordable.
__________________ Samira Tu'Ala, Organizer of the Las Vegas Bellydance Intensive & Festival September 9-12, 2010 at the FLAMINGO Hotel & Casino 1-888-LV-RAKS-U (1-888-587-2578)
As Laura 2 says above, there is a plaintext version as well. This is really timely for me as well, as I sent my first two mails using MailChimp. I have had a great response from my student list, and the metrics are really interesting (though they are only partly accurate).
I love MailChimp! :) It's made it very easy for me to send out mailers to my groups. I also am able to make several mailing groups for different mailers. :) I would recommend it for anyone who is computer dumb like me lol
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~Mina, Dalloua Dance Co Director
I used Constantcontact before, and Mailchimp took me a bit more time to setup the first template than CC, but for the rest Mailchimp is easy peasy.. and free!
Ps: Also love that they have a free archiving option, so I can link to past issues of the newsletter on my homepage.
__________________ www.khalida.biz Bellydancer of the world 2007
Wow, Galatea... awesome of you to point us towards this service! I don't pay a lot for my current service, (Express email marketing through Godaddy) but mailchimp even looks like it has more flexibility and better programming. I definitely fit into their "free" category as well.
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Bellydance in Elgin, IL http://www.elginbellydance.com
After this thread got started, I decided to give MailChimp a try being as it is free. I love it. Great video tutorials, tons of free features.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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