Sending mail to everybody
Sorry for the punny set subjects, but I couldn’t help myself. This should be the last email themed issue for a while. Next week we starting looking at images and media. Let me know if you have anything to share.
As I mentioned last issue, a number of the companies offering the transactional email services, also offer email marketing services as well. So it is worth taking a look at those providers as well as the ones I list here if you are looking for that type of service. Likewise, I believe you can use these services for transactional emails as well.
A question you may be asking is why would a developer want email marketing for a hobby project? And the easy answer is that you likely will not. However, if you ever want to manage a list of subscribers or contacts for a newsletter or even just to send release updates, it is something you may look into.
And if any of your hobbies gain any sort of user base, it can be nice to have a way to manage growing that brand. It isn’t something that I usually think about when creating hobby projects, but if you allow people to sign up for whatever you create, you should add some fine print allowing yourself to contact your users if necessary. Most of these tools will allow users to self manage their subscriptions as well.
MailChimp
You can’t mention email marketing without mentioning MailChimp. I can’t say it is the biggest or the best, but it is possibly the most iconic. They provide 2,000 contacts and 10,000 monthly sends for free. They also have tons of integrations with other systems and apps. Certainly a solid choice if you want to start growing your brand.
Sender
Sender is a service I just found while compiling this issue, so I don’t have anything personal to say about it. However, given that the plan they highlight on their pricing page is the free plan kind of won me over. With 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 monthly emails, it is the best of this lot. The features they provide are comparable to if not more inviting than some of the bigger players. Having spent some time looking at them, I’m might try them out myself.
MailerLite
MailerLite is one that I looked at personally for hosting this newsletter at one point. The features they offered to the free plan seemed better, things like A/B testing. They only allow 1,000 subscribers on the free plan, but 12,000 monthly emails isn’t bad. The only problem with them, and the reason I’m not using them now is that required that I have an existing website. They won’t let you host a new newsletter without an existing site.
I probably shouldn’t talk about the service I didn’t use to host this newsletter without mentioning the service I did use. As I’m sure their branding has indicated, I’m using Revue, which is a dedicated editorial newsletter service. It is very easy to use and I’m generally pretty happy with the choice.