I need to send bulk emails to Community Group members

jammy-jan

I am helping set up a Flooding Mutual Aid Group and need to be able to send out bulk emails to our members. I’d prefer a free or very cheap platform and would be sending one or two emails to around 100 people each month. We have an outlook email account at the moment but don’t want to risk GDPR issues if we forget to hide everyone’s details! Any suggestions and recommendations greatly appreciated. Thanks.

x_raphael_xx

As long as the email addresses are in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) line instead of CC (Carbon Copy) line, they won't be seen.

Savvy_Sue

x_raphael_xx said:

As long as the email addresses are in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) line instead of CC (Carbon Copy) line, they won't be seen.

Indeed, but people are human ...

Mailchimp. I suspect the free account doesn't allow for more than one person to be able to login and send emails, but it works. May take a bit of time to get your head round it, but it can be as simple or as complicated as you want. 

Undervalued

x_raphael_xx said:

As long as the email addresses are in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) line instead of CC (Carbon Copy) line, they won't be seen.

Indeed but excessive use of bcc is blocked by some mail systems and can also trigger span checkers so it is not a reliable way of doing bulk mailings.

I would follow the suggestions made in the responses to your other thread....

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6421262/i-need-to-send-buik-emails-for-a-community-group#latest

Exodi

I use mailchimp for my company... and it's free.

100 people is fine, can add 100 contacts pretty easily via an excel spreadsheet.

Takes a little while setting up your first email (making sure it looks nice and building a good template).

After that you can just keep duplicating the campaign, changing the text, bish bash bosh, professional email sent out in 5 minutes.

And it features analytics so you can see who has opened it.

Exodi

x_raphael_xx said:

As long as the email addresses are in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) line instead of CC (Carbon Copy) line, they won't be seen.

We are all human.

Over the years I've seen a handful of big 'oopsies' where a supplier has accidently sent their whole client list to their whole client list, all because they've mistakenly entered contacts into the CC field instead of BCC.

jammy-jan

We’ll probably be sending a few lines of email and attached newsletter to 50-100 people. Free version of Mailchimp looks good for this. Thanks.

jDelight

jammy-jan said:

We’ll probably be sending a few lines of email and attached newsletter to 50-100 people. Free version of Mailchimp looks good for this. Thanks.

We use it too, I think it might be a good fit for what you need to do. 

Savvy_Sue

jammy-jan said:

We’ll probably be sending a few lines of email and attached newsletter to 50-100 people. Free version of Mailchimp looks good for this. Thanks.

Note you can't send attachments. You can include links, so I (used to) post the attachments on our website, then include the link in the email.

jammy-jan

Savvy_Sue said:

jammy-jan said:

We’ll probably be sending a few lines of email and attached newsletter to 50-100 people. Free version of Mailchimp looks good for this. Thanks.

Note you can't send attachments. You can include links, so I (used to) post the attachments on our website, then include the link in the email.

We don’t have a website. Is there a way of including a newsletter?

Savvy_Sue

You can produce quite smart looking stuff within mailchimp, which might work better for you than attaching something - every click someone has to do loses you a certain % of your readership! And when I'm reading email on my phone, I often just don't bother if there are attachments, I always intend to look at it later, but often fail ... 

Take a look at it, there are templates and guides. It takes time, I remember the first time I had to use it was at work and I thought it was diabolical! But once I got my head round it I was away. 

I was sending out a newsy chatty email with lots of links in it to things I thought people might find interesting - funny things, moving things, useful things. I'd try to include a photo each time (and they do take a bit of work to establish what size, how to crop etc). Occasionally there was a link to our website - if there was a form we wanted people to fill in, mostly, or for our programme of events - the programme could just as well have been included within the mailchimp, but it would have been more effort to make it look 'right' there, and we were very much 'hybrid' and not expecting everyone to receive emails (mind you, they missed out on my newsy chatty stuff!!!)