Independent Email Marketing

[colinbrislawn]

We need to set up our email newsletter independent of other Arts organization in Richland.

• [x] Pick out a service provider: MailChimp.
• [x] Import contact list to new service, like MailChimp.
• [x] Make signup forms for new service, and put them on the website.
• [ ] Connect MailChimp with Facebook

[colinbrislawn]

Let's also consider sendgrid Benchmark

Sendgrid is slick, and their free tier would probably work for us. Benchmark includes discounts for yearly pricing and nonprofits.

Both providers offer subaccount management with the the paid option.

Update: Sendgrid just moved subuser management up to a higher tier, but now offers scheduling / templates / etc. for free. I'm proposing we use Sendgrid (and can share one account if needed).

Update: Sendgrid refuses a make an email signup winget, clearly showing that they don't care about email newsletters, just transactional email. Let's not use Sendgrid.

[colinbrislawn]

We now have a paid Mailchimp account. To use it I need to

• [x] Make theme plugin with Mailchimp winget
• [x] Add signup winget to live site
• [x] Set up subscriber list using...
  • [x] Existing people in Sendgrid list (without those who unsupped)
  • [x] new subscribers in the constant contact list
• [x] Build new email template

[colinbrislawn]

Final email setup with MailChimp will be tracked over in #35

[colinbrislawn]

It's the future and MailChimp sold out to Intuit.

After our non-profit discount, we pay them $300 per year.

Now let's consider these services: https://www.sender.net/pricing/ Generous free tier and paid starts $100/year https://www.sendx.io/pricing paid starts $90/year https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing Paid starts at $162/year, but does support sign-in with MS!

Sender also offers Pay As You pricing:

700 subs x (7 concerts +4 alerts = 11 messages) ~= 8k emails per year

USD we pay today	emails	Years it takes us to use it	$/year	$/month
$29	5,000	0.6	46.4	3.9
$57	10,000	1.3	45.6	3.8
$97	20,000	2.5	38.8	3.2
👉 $167	50,000	6.3	26.7	2.2
$277	100,000	12.5	22.2	1.8

Paying half the yearly cost of mailchimp for 6 years of services seems pretty good to me. We could buy the $29 plan to test it out. This is my suggestion, @camerata-webmaster

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EDIT: Or we set up a Substack for free, lol, because they don't charge for free content: We can import from Mailchimp and up a signup form on our site Substack always shows their branding and cross-promotes posts: See this substack takedown by one of their comparators

[colinbrislawn]

Signup link on bottom of homepage and About Us (and mabe contact us, unless we move that page to About Us)

[colinbrislawn]

I was able to log into Sender.net this morning. I made a signup form, but I could not activate it until they approved it. (I guess it's a fraud check.)

Now, my 2FA codes are no longer working. I cannot log in.

So far, Sender.net has been extremely unreliable.

(Let's try this. @sendernet, can you help me get our accounts up and running? We want to pay you, lol)

[colinbrislawn]

Let's consider Maildroppa https://maildroppa.com/pricing.html

$60 per year for up to 1k subscribers, which is a good price.

[colinbrislawn]

Sender form is added, see #56