Blogging Tips

MailChimp pretty much owns the email marketing space. They’re like the NetFlix of email lists. They were early to the game while providing a good product that was easy for non-technical users to use.

In fact, I personally used them for multiple companies I ran and controlled.

But over time, if your list grows, it can get mighty expensive to keep up with MailChimp’s costs (or any other list builder/manager for that matter).

MailChimp offers many great features for marketing automation and data management; but I found I was handling most of that work with other tools (like Mautic, which I’ll write about another time). MailChimp was primarily used for one thing – to send email to the marketing list.

If you’re not making use the tools, it’s ridiculously expensive to use MailChimp. So I began looking for alternatives that would save me money.

It’s important not to shoot your business in the foot trying to save money. Sometimes there are worthwhile investments and costs. But when an opportunity presents itself, it’s foolish to not consider it just because it’s cheap(er).

The problem is, almost every option out there has the same model – they have a free (or cheap) initial tier, but once your list is of even a small size, it starts escalating in cost quickly.

Enter Sendy

Sendy allows you to run your own email list system. While other tools are available to do this, most are complicated to use. Sendy is simple for even non-technical users to set up and configure.

Once you buy it, you own it. I like that feature – no ongoing costs for the software.

It’s relatively simple to install, configure, and maintain, thus the costs of ownership are minimal. As far as maintenance is concerned, you’re already managing your list with your current platform, and that’s 99% of the work with Sendy as well.

Some of the features Sendy offers are:

• Reporting
• Autoresponders
• List segmentation
• Subscriber management
• Custom fields
• Bounce, complaint, and unsubscribe handling
• 3rd party integration

Couple it with Amazon AWS SES (Simple Email Service)

Amazon’s AWS SES email service is a cost effective tool for sending bulk email. The cost of sending email through MailChimp can easily run into thousands of dollars per year even for a relatively moderate email list.

AWS pricing is very cheap – $0.10 per 1,000 messages.

Wait, you say? That’s not cheap?

How about adding onto this the fact that if you use an Amazon EC2 instance to send (i.e. hosting your Sendy application), you can send 62,000 messages per month for free?

In full disclosure, you do pay a little for data in the email as well. When calculated out, it’s far, far cheaper than using a hosted service like MailChimp. I mean like “not even close” kind of cheaper.

Getting Started

Here’s a link for you to buy Sendy and get up and running quickly and easily:

Get Sendy today and start saving money on your email marketing

That’s an affiliate link. I make a little money on it when you buy it, but you pay the same regardless. So why not help this site out since it’s helping you save a bundle on your email efforts. (BTW, if you couldn’t figure it out from this article, I’m a satisfied user of Sendy myself. I don’t promote affiliate links for products that I don’t own and use myself.)

To sweeten the deal, if you’re a WordPress plugin developer, here’s an API wrapper I wrote that you can use in your own WP plugins to integrate with Sendy.