I was recently discussing his mailing list with missionary Scottie DeHart (Missionary to Mexico). I set up a website for them (dehartmissions.com) last month, and we had talked about some of their other ministry needs.
They were currently manually sending out their email (they have about 188 on their mailing list). I suggested he take a look at MailChimp.
MailChimp is free if your mailing list has less than 1000 names on it. It allows you to track how many people actually open the emails, how many click on links in the email, automatically tracks bounced emails and cleans your list of bad email addresses.
It allows people that no longer wish to get your Newsletter to unsubscribe themselves. In short, it makes your life easier if you are maintaining a mailing list manually on your own today, and MailChimp gives you loads of free extras (statistics, graphs etc).
Scottie uses a Juno email account, and unfortunately MailChimp does not like mail accounts like Juno, Gmail etc.
I set up an email forwarding account using his domain (dehartmissions.com) which forwards to his Juno account. MailChimp was happy with that. So was Scottie’s mom! Scottie sent me the following message:
“Thank you so much for setting up the forwarding email. It is certainly working. My mom is thrilled she has been sending out the news letters via juno.com for years and has to send it 12 times to send it to all of the 188 people that get the MacGyver Monthly each month. Chimp is sooooo cool.”
If you are handling a manual mailing list, MailChimp is definitely worth taking a look at!
