How can I send my ezine to a large number of subscribers?
With a small number of subscribers, you can send your ezine the same way you send regular email. But once you have 50 or more people on your list, you will start encountering problems if you continue doing it this way. What you need is a mailing list management system, and there are three that I recommend, depending on your needs.
There are several problems with sending your ezine by regular email. Most ISP’s won’t allow you to send an email to more than 50 people at the same time. And if you get around that by breaking up your subscriber list and sending multiple emails, you’ll discover that most ISP’s set a daily maximum on the number of emails you can send.
Also, sending your ezine this way means that you must maintain your mailing list by hand, subscribing, unsubscribing, and updating addresses one by one in response to emailed requests. Using a mailing list management system allows your subscribers to make these changes themselves, saving you time, and making it easier for people to subscribe.
Here are the three systems I recommend you choose from:
This is an excellent solution if you plan to send out just an email newsletter and don’t plan to make use of autoresponders to maintain multiple mailing lists and send out different types of automated messages. Constant Contact includes an HTML newsletter composition tool integrated with the system. I recommend it mostly to people who plan to maintain a newsletter list in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and who don’t plan to have a shopping cart on their website. It’s the easiest to use of the three.
If you anticipate a mailing list in the thousands within a few years time, AWeber is a better and more affordable solution than Constant Contact. They offer predesigned HTML templates for your newsletter but not the same type of integrated composition tool Constant Contact has. They also give you the flexibility of setting up mutiple mailing lists based on the same database, and sending automated messages instead of just scheduled broadcasts. If you plan a large mailing list but don’t plan to have a shopping cart, this is probably your best choice.
If you want to have a shopping cart on your website that integrates with your mailing list system, includes autoresponders, and allows you to maintain a mailing list in the thousands, this would be your best choice. This same product is also marketed under the names 1ShoppingCart, Cartville, KickStartCart, EasyWebAutomation, Marketers Choice, and others.
They don’t have an HTML newsletter composition tool or templates (although they have promised that is in the works), so you need to compose your newsletter outside the system (or have a designer create a template for you) and copy it over. This is the vendor I use for my own list of 20,000 subscribers.
Keep in mind that whichever mailing list system you begin with, you will want to stick with for a long period of time. None of these vendors will allow you to upload a pre-existing mailing list without reconfirming your subscribers, because there have been too many abuses of this by spammers. If you change your vendor, you will need to ask all your subscribers to opt in to your new system, and you will lose a significant percentage of your mailing list.
