We need to find a simple and easy service that will let my friend click one button and be instantly able to save a new contact and let us categorize it there. Like old-school Hotmail did. She wants to be able to send many emails at once without it going into the spam folder. Being able to set up scheduled e-mails & auto delivery is a must. We don’t care if this is a paid service. We also want a way for people to sign up for the newsletter or what have you & we can send it out TO SUBSCRIBERS en masse. (Not spamming- only subscribers would get such mailings.)
Howdy.
You could start here - Mailing list - Wikipedia
A bit about one of the many programs you could use: LISTSERV - LISTSERV - Wikipedia.
LISTSERVs download page - Download Evaluation: LISTSERV, LISTSERV Lite, LISTSERV Maestro
They seem to offer trial versions, or a lite freeware for non profit groups. You could have a play around and see if it suits your needs.
Please note: I have NOT used Listserv for many, many years. I am not recommending it, just saying it might do what you want to do.
It might also eat your cat and steal your car. I just don’t know…
MailChimp
MailChimp, Constant Contact, CampaignMonitor - this type of email marketing service is the way to go.
These companies allow you to design and save mass emails on their site for delivery when you schedule it, it houses the database of subscribers, and it automates the process of someone signing up or unsubscribing so you don’t have to manage that yourself.
They also have all sorts of email templates already built so you can choose one you like, put in your information and off you go - or you can paste in HTML code of your own. You can store your own images for use in emails (your company logo for instance), they provide HTML code so you can slap a pretty “subscribe to our newsletter” area on your website… it’s pretty slick.
I use Constant Contact for my business newsletters and I’ve been quite happy with it. It actually does a lot more than we need. There is a monthly cost for it.
Listserv, on the other hand, is free. When I used to use it years ago, it was quite a pain in the neck to set up and it did plain text only, but it got the job done.
With Constant Contact, everything resides on their server. With listserv, it resides on your computer.
So I’ve been taking some time in learning the free MailChimp, and only now I realize that the AutoResponder function I want is on the Paid version. Anyone know of any free autoresponse e-mail sources or mailing services? Thanks!
I’m bumping this to ask if the free MailChimp allows one to schedule e-mails in advance.
Also, another business e-mail service Benchmarkemail.com that has a free service has come to ous attention. Any experience with this? While it won’t let us drag our contact list into it, can we copy/paste individual entries or do we have to have people sign up to it off our site?