acwinsett
07-30-2009, 06:19 AM
I wanted to take a moment to share something new I've been doing lately. I started poking around at a way to send out really nice email newsletters, and found a cool new service called MailChimp. It's an online service where you go in and set up your mailing list, then create your really great professional-looking email messages, called "campaigns". The service will send your messages and track how many people read them, who read them, which links they clicked, etc. Best of all, you can set up a free account that allows you to store up to 100 email addresses. With the free account you get 600 "sends" per month. So, for example, I started out with 600 sends, sent a message to 30 addresses, and now I have 570 sends left for the month. So, for something like a wedding, it would be unlikely you would need to exceed the limit for the free account.
Here's a preview of what it looks like in an email inbox:
http://andreah.smugmug.com/photos/605991081_xSPdQ-L.jpg
Click Here (http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=5b1a3549efe7960a1d373a22d&id=86be70a023&e=2387de2d11) to view the whole message. (And please pardon the typos . . . I wrote the message at 5am!)
It doesn't take a whole lot of programming or technical know-how to get this going. (But if you know enough about HTML to do a MySpace page, then it certainly doesn't hurt!) There are pre-designed templates to help you get started.
Also, there are pre-built tools to clean up bad our out-of-date email addresses and, if any user wishes to not receive these types of messages, then they can unsubscribe.
I hope some other brides might find this service helpful!
Here's a preview of what it looks like in an email inbox:
http://andreah.smugmug.com/photos/605991081_xSPdQ-L.jpg
Click Here (http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=5b1a3549efe7960a1d373a22d&id=86be70a023&e=2387de2d11) to view the whole message. (And please pardon the typos . . . I wrote the message at 5am!)
It doesn't take a whole lot of programming or technical know-how to get this going. (But if you know enough about HTML to do a MySpace page, then it certainly doesn't hurt!) There are pre-designed templates to help you get started.
Also, there are pre-built tools to clean up bad our out-of-date email addresses and, if any user wishes to not receive these types of messages, then they can unsubscribe.
I hope some other brides might find this service helpful!