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| MailChimp offers good reporting tools for my mailing list |
In my last post, I wrote about my art database. Now, let's talk about mailing lists.
As I have said elsewhere, my mailing list is my most prized possession. I have found that sending out regular newsletters and announcements is, for me, far more effective than social media. My mailing list consists mostly of qualified contacts—collectors, students and others who are interested in new paintings, workshops or painting retreats. Many of them are repeat buyers and repeat students.
I previously used Microsoft Word, Access and Outlook for my newsletters. I kept my contacts in Access, created my document in Word and then used the mail merge tool to pull contacts from Access, insert them in Word and send the letters via Outlook. Cumbersome? You bet.
Then I discovered MailChimp. It does everything Word, Access and Outlook used do, only seamlessly. But best of all, it maintains my mailing list. That is, it cleans the list as it encounters hard and soft bounces. (A "hard" bounce means that the email or mail server no longer exists; "soft" means that the person's mailbox is filled or that there is some temporary glitch.) Hard bounces are cleaned immediately; soft bounces are cleaned only after a certain number of attempts. Finally, it reports who opened what—and who didn't—and offers a variety of useful statistics. There's a lot more MailChimp can do, but I find mailing, list maintenance and reporting to be sufficient for me.
There's a free version, which is limited to 2000 contacts. For most of us, that's all we need. For those who have a larger fan base, $9.99/month will let you have up to 50,000 contacts. If you're super-popular or have purchased a mailing list, you can pay $299/month to maintain 200,000 or more names.
In my next post, I'll write about social media. Yes, again! I know I've written about it before, but things have changed.
