Find an app that we can use for the mailing list

The Reef
1

since i have seen this in the todo list for team IT
I create a thread

2

my first reflections on possibilities.

mailjet

mailjet is a good option but i think it requires we have our own mail server. and change our DNS records so that the app can send emails for us

mailchimp

same thing as mailjet but i trust more mailjet than mailchimp for privacy issues,

3

Thanks @manuelpueyo! Both seem a bit overkill. Let’s start with needs:

  1. Reliable delivery (necessary): we do not want our emails to end up in the spam folder, which happens a lot to folks with gmail/hotmail addresses (that is, almost everyone).
  2. GDPR compliance (nice to have). People can and do sign up to our newsletter. Strictly speaking, that makes us subject to the GDPR. We should have a little policy in case of data breaches, etc. In practice, no one cares abiut 100 email addresses for a cohousing, and making a minimum of compliance is not hard.

Everything else we don’t care about. A/B testing, mail editors, etc. are basically tools for marketing, which, in today’s media landscape is 99% spamming. This means, they cater for situations where companies send tens of millions of email, and even increasing the percentage of people who click on the “Buy now” link by a tiny amount is gong to be profitable, because the numbers are so large. This does not apply to The Reef.

With that said, I don’t have other ideas. I googled around and a bit, and found this list of services including Mailchimp. The first one seems decent. In the end, if @manuelpueyo or @Pieter volunteer to run the mailing list, I am happy with letting them do it the way they want.

4

My first question: Why do we need a mailing list exactly? What will we put in it? :slight_smile:

I’m the most familiar with Mailchimp, so my preference would go to that one.

5

We are still looking to expand the group. Right now, we have 60 people who signed up for updates, and they need to be made aware of the public presentation of Oct 24.

6

Sorry if this question wasn’t clear.

It’s Team Recruitment and Onboarding that needs a tool that makes it easy to send emails to 50-100 people.

Problems I currently encounter:

  • Emails end up in spam, even with all the precautions possible
  • I need to manually extract all emails from a Google form, copy/paste them in Word and then manually put commas in between them
  • If people want to unsubscribe, I need to manually remove their address from our list (talk about cumbersome?)
  • I have to pay attention to putting all email addresses in bcc (minor problem, but still)

So my reasoning was that one or the other mailing list app could offer a solution to many of these problems, but maybe I was wrong. Regardless, can you please see whether there is a solution to these problems?

Many thanks!

1 Like
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You were right. All apps solve all these problems.

8

I think mailchimp would solve all those problems. and both@Pieter and me are familiar with.

Ideally we would need

  • embed the mailchimp form in our web so that people who would like to be updated can subscribe and this data goes directly to the list

  • create an automated rule: all new event attendees go to our mailing list

  • if you want to unsubscribe you can add that option at the end of the email you send and mailchip deletes that person from the list

the only thing i am not sure. do we need our own email server?

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9

@alberto can you send me again the access to the domain name provider for thereef.brussels? i would like to do some tests. thank you

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I am testing mailjet.

The idea of the tool is that we prepare the email in that platform, choose the list we want and send it using the @thereef.brussels domain as sender.
It’s a free account so we can login with my name and password, adding new team members is paying feature.
We can benefit from all the things described above in the thread, and include a link to unsubscribe automatically at the end of the email.

next steps

import our emails from Google form and create a list in mailjet
craft the first email (i can help you with that)
add the new link to our website so that new people automatically join the list

who wants to try? :grinning:

technical description of the setup

knowing this is not necessary for sending emails but for the sake of clarity and transparency.
i use my work mail server, but thanks to some DNS config we can use the server to send emails with the domain @thereef.brussels

11

Thanks a million @manuelpueyo!

The Reef’s mailing list is in the Communication folder (internal link). Can you please take care of this?

Important note: I curated the list manually, flagging addresses that should not be included with a “1”. These are people who joined a presentation but decided not to join, or people who became Exploring Members but then decided not to move on.

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@alberto do you have a test environment of another page like the reef. i would like to try to embed an html widget for the subscription to the newsletter

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Register to our mailing list. link has changed. every new person will join the list from mailjet. @Lee let me know, i can give you a tutorial on how to send emails to the list. cheers

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Thanks!