Newsletters

If you want professional looking newsletters, then mailchimp is the way to go. It's free up to 2,000 subscribers. It has a minor learning curve that can be mastered in a day, and from there you can save templates, sign up forms and campaigns. It has a drag and drop builder that makes professional looking emails.

cwbrowning said:

I've decided it's really time to set up a quarterly newsletter for my readers. I'll have a link on my website for them to sign up, etc. However, does anyone have any suggestions of how to do this? I know there are sites out there that will take care of it for you, but I don't want the newsletter to look like spam to the kind souls who sign up for it.

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This is indeed a potential problem, especially with a newsletter sent out only quarterly. People can forget who you are, and the "spam" button is only a reflex away.

It helps to begin each "issue" by reminding people why they're receiving it. ("Thanks, as always, for having requested my newsletter. As you might remember from last time ..." etc. etc.).

It's also good to explain openly that people can unsubscribe with a single click - should they ever wish to - "by clicking the link at the bottom" (any autoresponder company which is legally compliant requires this to be included with your mailing anyway, so you may as well draw attention to it, because doing so reduces the proportion of subscribers who might otherwise mistakenly click the "spam" button provided by their email client software, which can get you into trouble).

So much for the factual part. What follows here is opinion (informed and carefully formed opinion, admittedly, but opinion only): I strongly advise you, for many reasons, not to use "Mailchimp". I recommend either GetResponse ($15/month) or Aweber ($20/month). It really is worth paying for a professional service, for high delivery rates to people's in-boxes (rather than to their "spam"/"junk" folders), and for freedom from many other complications, problems and diffculties. I know Mailchimp's popular with authors (I think because of its initial, free service), but almost anyone professionally involved in email marketing will advise similarly. If I had $1 for each of the people I know who lost their Mailchimp accounts (and sometimes their lists) without ever understanding what they'd done wrong, I might not even have to work for a living at all.

If paying for GetResponse/Aweber is out of the question for you, there are some self-hosted options you can use instead, but they require some technical skills and familiarity. (Still far better and safer than Mailchimp!).

Always keep an independent back-up of your mailing-list (i.e. one that you can access without needing to log into your autoresponder service to do so).

I've been intrigued by the concept of newsletters myself. I follow at least one author's newsletter, as well as a couple agents. I've thought about having one if I self-publish.

Alexaherself:

What follows here is opinion (informed and carefully formed opinion, admittedly, but opinion only): I strongly advise you, for many reasons, not to use "Mailchimp". I recommend either GetResponse ($15/month) or Aweber ($20/month). It really is worth paying for a professional service, for high delivery rates to people's in-boxes (rather than to their "spam"/"junk" folders), and for freedom from many other complications, problems and diffculties. I know Mailchimp's popular with authors (I think because of its initial, free service), but almost anyone professionally involved in email marketing will advise similarly. If I had $1 for each of the people I know who lost their Mailchimp accounts (and sometimes their lists) without ever understanding what they'd done wrong, I might not even have to work for a living at all.

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Could you elaborate on the problems with Mailchimp? I know the author I follow uses it, and I've liked the layout it has. What sort of issues have the other author's had?

SBibb said:

What sort of issues have the other author's had?

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The issues about which people most commonly complain are poor delivery rates to subscribers' in-boxes, rather than to their "spam"/"junk"/"bulk" folders (people who don't test, reliably and frequently, themselves, by subscribing to their own lists from several different email addresses and using different email client software tend to be unaware of this: it's something of a "marketer's trick") and extremely idiosyncratic and inconsistent interpretations of the terms of service (which often come to people's notice only when their accounts are suddenly terminated without notice and without their understanding what they've allegedly done wrong).

That last point, on the web, is a problem frequently associated with the use of "free services". It's much better, in general, to be either a paying customer (in practice, this tends to give you some "rights") or a self-provider of services (in this case, that would mean installing and using a self-hosted autoresponder).

I believe (but can't offer any direct evidence for this belief) that Mailchimp is especially trigger-happy when it comes to closing down the accounts of their free users who ever get any "spam complaints". These are always a potential problem, and especially for service-users who send infrequent mailings and/or "broadcasts" only rather than scheduled email series (and Mailchimp's free service is limited to "broadcasts" only!). Some people are careless; others imagine that clicking on "spam" is the same thing as clicking on "unsubscribe". Unjust it may be, but the reality is that list-owners commonly suffer from mistaken subscriber identification of their emails as "spam". The ways to avoid this are (a) to send email regularly and reliably, so that subscribers never forget who you are and that they opted in, and (b) to use email series rather than or in addition to broadcasts (another good reason for avoiding Mailchimp).

There's an additional problem, too: no serious, professional autoresponder company will allow new customers to import a list built at Mailchimp without all their subscribers re-opting in. In reality, an attempt to migrate a list from Mailchimp to another service provider is likely to lead to a loss of anything between about 50% and 75% of the subscribers. The idea of "starting out with Mailchimp's free service and switching to something rather more professional when one can better justify the cost" is, therefore, deeply flawed.

In summary: this is one of the very few issues in "internet marketing" which it really does pay to "get right" the first time you set it up: unfortunately there's a considerable opportunity-cost to "learning from experience", in this regard.

cwbrowning said:

Lot's to think about...

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Indeed. Not an easy decision, but one that has an annoying habit of turning out only with the benefit of hindsight to "have been more important than one realised".

Bear in mind also the potential downside of "do-it-yourself" solutions:-

(i) It's your own internet connection, domain-name registration and hosting that can be placed in jeopardy, if recipients ever complain (in theory, not much of a problem to an author, if you're completely FTC-compliant and "Can-Spam-Act"-compliant);

(ii) There are invariably "technical issues";

(iii) For understandable reasons it will almost never be possible, at a later stage, to import a self-built list into an autoresponder service, if you change your mind in future.

The advantages of starting off with a professional service are all too apparent. The only drawback is the cost, but GetResponse's $15 per month (with the first month free) doesn't exactly break the bank?

(I'd also suggest that a monthly newsletter - even if it's a small one - has many advantages over a quarterly one.)

Thanks for elaborating, alexaherself. I appreciate it.