Email Newsletter Set Up- Avoid the mistakes, clutter, and $$$ by starting on the right foot.
How To: Set Up and Manage Your Newsletter Lists
A few days ago, we discussed how your church lets those who attend know what’s going on. If you are running a ministry that utilizes a website or online communication, a regular email newsletter is a great way to keep people informed. Maybe your church only uses paper bulletins right now, and are considering a move towards a more electronic solution. Maybe you have a mailing list that is starting to get out of control or beyond what your current solution is capable of. You’ve already started collecting email addresses, so how can you get your newsletter to them? There are three ways that you can bring your bulletins or newsletters online, or get a better handle on how you email the masses.
- Sending your newsletter using your email client
- Hosted services that run on a third-party server
- Newsletter software that runs on your own server
photo by uzvards
Most email clients, both online and desktop, have an address book or contact solution in themselves. You can create groups and manually manage the individual addresses. This would be useful in cases involving small groups, classes, prayer chains, or smaller congregations with 100 or less addresses (depending how organized you are). If you have more than that, you might want to look into a more manageable solution.
Each mail client seems to have their own name and set up for groups. Gmail and OS X Mail call them “groups”. Outlook – Distribution Lists. While in Hotmail, Live, Bing, and Yahoo accounts they are called “categories”. Whatever client you use, before you send the newsletter, make sure to put yourself under the TO: line, and put the group or category under the BCC: (Blind Carbon Copy) line so that when the recipient receives the email; they aren’t also receiving everyone in that category’s email address (unless of course you want everyone to have each others’ address)
Pros: Free! No learning curve if you’re using your email client that you regularly use.
Cons: The lists can become overwhelming if you don’t stay on top of them. Added, changing, removing addresses, and bounces (undelivered emails) can be frustrating if you don’t want to invest the time into it. Also, some ISPs will treat email as spam if it’s a bulk email that isn’t sent directly to the recipient using the To: line. This can result in you constantly asking people, “Did you check your spam folder?”
Hosted services that run on a third-party server
This is the easiest, hands-off solution. If you’re looking to build your email subscriptions, or use email subscriptions as a way to market your product, hosted services can be worth the fee that is charged. Many hosted solutions provide information, graphs, and charts that can give you an idea of how your newsletters are doing, and what people are doing with them. Typically they manage bounces by automatically removing them from your lists. Another common feature is A/B testing, which allows you to send two different versions of your newsletter to see which version gets the best response.
Popular hosted newsletter services are:
MailChimp – Has a great and easy way of making email newsletters look great. You can use their pretty cool templates or design your own. Also is free for 500 or less subscribers.
AWeber – If your focus is on marketing, this might be the route you want to take.
Pros: Great for large subscriber accounts.
Cons: Cost. Over purchasing software (which I’m seeing more and more people do) is just as bad as under purchasing.
Newsletter software that runs on your own server
If you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee, or you’d rather take a more hands-on approach, you can install list management software on your own web server. Here are some popular ones:
Mailman - List manager for has a good history and name behind itself. Can handle newsletters and discussions (where people can send messages back). I didn’t find it too user friendly, but once things are set up, it’s reliable and just works. Best quality: It’s free
phplist - Also free. Keeps track of opened emails. Slightly more user friendly than Mailman.
Pros – Control over your email lists. No monthly fees.
Cons – Not very user friendly.
Do you use a newsletter service? What do you prefer?
Related posts:
My recent post White Flag – Holier Than Thou
These are great…thanks Brett for the help.
Awesome! Glad it helps.
Good stuff. Thanks for the info.
Here at the church I work at we do have a weekly email we send out to over 250 addresses. Right now I am using Email Marketing Pro (unlicensed, free version) and I really like it, however I do sometimes have issues with it. I'm gonna check Mailman.
Yeah, Mailman came highly recommended. It's not for the faint of heart. As long as you know what you're doing, you'll be fine. If you call your browser "Foxfire", chances are, you're going to stumble around with it.
I think, like you said, it depends on what your goals are and why you're using it.
I like MailChimp and AWeber. MailChimp is good if you have less than 500 subscribers because it's free. If you have over 500 subscribers, it seems to make sense to pay for it… considering all the benefits you get from a professional third party host. I still have issues with AWeber, but for now, I think it's the best out there.
If you're just sending to a couple dozen people, straight up email can work well. In the case of only a couple dozen, most people are close enough in the group to be willing to whitelist you.
-Marshall Jones Jr.
Yeah, I was very impressed with MailChimp, and I might be switching to that myself. They have some nice, easy and attractive templates. Let me know if you make the switch.
This is a good question, one I think you answered well! Technically speaking, there are pluses and minuses to both, all depending on who you are and your goals. A self-hosted solutions allows you flexibility and control BUT when things go awry, there is no one you can call to say, "Hey, I pay you for this, now fix it!" That may also be the issue for a free service, not sure. Basically, you get what you pay for, and like you said, you CAN overpay if a solution is more than you need.
You can also use Wordpress to craft your own newsletter solution:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/create-a-f...