Which mailing list platform is best in this situation?

Factual Questions
1

Hey all,

So, I’m going to TRY to make this as brief and to the point as possible. :wink:

I recently took over a huge fansite as head admin. I’m not sure if I was sane when I did this, but I’m determined to do anything possible to get us back to where we used to be before the previous head admins flaked and stopped doing anything at all with that site. The previous sys admin type person has kind of stayed on… she’s willing to do everything needed to keep the actual site itself going, but I don’t think she’s going to put all of her free time into it by any means.

Here’s the situation. I’m doing several zillion things to turn the site around-- a new YT channel, new videos, new fics, new FB page, new blah blah bleh, and above all, the revival of the fic exchanges. The general consensus seems to be that this, more than anything else, is what will bring things back to life in a serious way.

We have about 20,000 members and about 750 authors. I think that a lot of people WOULD be very interested in getting involved again IF they knew that so many new things were going on. Sys Admin Person says that we are allowed to send email to everyone for site announcements and updates, and as part of this, we would ask people if they wanted to ALSO opt into a mailing list. (Remember, these are all members who originally signed up.) We (well, mostly I) would then transfer all of the info for the opt-ins to a new database.

The question is how to send those original 20,000 emails. Our platform can’t do it (efiction.) Mailchimp won’t do it, because they need everyone to be already opted in before they’ll allow sending anything at all. I’m talking to SAP about this, but again, she’s very busy… I really want to get SOME idea on my own of what we’d be looking at here.

Everyone here is so smart!! I just know that somebody knows the answer… :slight_smile:

P.S.: If it can’t be done through a platform, I’ll go through the member pages and msg each person one by one. Yes-- all 20,000 of them. THAT, I know I can do. I’ve figured out that it would take six months. We don’t want that to happen, do we?

2

Doesn’t MailChimp offer you a customizeable sign-up page?

If you are allowed to email about site updates, then that means people have opted in to that. You can load that list in to MailChimp and send an update that includes a link to opt in to the non-site-updates mailing list. Now everyone is opted in who wants in.

If not MailChimp then ConstantContact.

3

I like this idea! I’ll run it by the SATP (sys admin type person). That’s what I thought about the opt in aspect of the site updates. It would only be sent to members-- people who already signed up for this. But hopefully, SATP knows for sure. :wink: I’ll check out ConstantContact, too.