I just got elected to serve as secretary for a group that I'm a member of and part of my duties is to send out emails to all the members. We average about 2-3 emails per month about different events or quarterly newsletters, so it isn't that much work. But, we have a lot of members and the old secretary said they can only send an email to 100 members at a time using our yahoo account. So the same email has to be sent 3-4 times, and you have to remember where you left off the email before so you don't forget anyone or don't send to the same person twice.

I'm looking for suggestions of how to simplify this. I looked into mail chimp which is a free Constant Contact type service, but you have to create the email on their site and use their preformatted newsletters. We have an established newsletter format where we just have to change the wording and pictures that works pretty well. Plus there are a couple of other guys who sometimes send out emails if I can't do it and I don't want to change things up too much for them. Is there a site (free preferred) that just gives me an email address like myclub@3rdpartymailings.com where we could just email that address from our account and it would get to our members? I don't mind adding the names to another site, I'm just trying to simplify how we do it.

Thanks for any suggestions.

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Posted by pheroy

Raleigh, NC

Member since Oct 2006

738 posts

Posted on 11/14/22 at 6:29 pm to shadowlsu

I had to deal with this a few years ago when an org I send emails for suddenly hit some threshold (over 350 ish recipients) that got it classified as spam. It's gmail account. I did switch over to Mailchimp. But before I got that set up, what I did was create tags like "group 1", "group 2" in the gmail contacts and assign segments to different tags. That way I could send to each tag individually without having to manually keep track.

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Posted by shadowlsu

Member since May 2011

325 posts

Posted on 11/15/22 at 8:47 am to pheroy

quote:
create tags like "group 1", "group 2" in the gmail contacts and assign segments to different tags

I did this, but yahoo they are called "lists" but same concept. I'm about to have to make another list due to the others close to full and I was trying to simplify it.

I don't like how Mailchimp and others want you to use a format or create a new "campaign" which is more for retail businesses to create different sales email and target different people. It's too complicated for what we need.

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Posted by pheroy

Raleigh, NC

Member since Oct 2006

738 posts

Posted on 11/15/22 at 10:33 am to shadowlsu

There was definitely a learning curve with Mailchimp, figuring out what the heck their terms mean etc. I figured out how to set up a couple of templates, and now it's not too bad. On a weekly basis, it's pretty easy to manage the email I send, and add a handful of new subscribers we've signed up. While I agree that for the purpose of just sending out email notices to a relatively small group (hundreds, not thousands) it's not really oriented toward that, it's free. And it lets folks opt out if they want, reducing a little maintenance on the admin end.

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Posted by r3lay3r

EBR

Member since Oct 2016

2191 posts

Posted on 11/18/22 at 3:05 pm to shadowlsu

If you use Office (Microsoft) 365 this is pretty easy using mail merge. I know because I had to do the same this week. Have to use a MAPI mail server (Outlook, Gmail). Have a distribution list in Excel and use Word or Outlook to initiate the merge.

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