Taking my Mailing list seriously, so a first question....

[David Healey]

@Lindon Use Amazon SES, it's the cheapest and it's reliable.

Combine this with a good CRM, I really like FluentCRM because it's reasonably priced, has lots of good features, and integrates with other WP plugins I'm using.

[David Healey]

Oh and you'll need an emailing strategy to get reliable results. At a minimum you'll want a launch system for each new release and an automated nurture strategy to give your audience continued value and keep them warm.

I just remembered Emmett made a good little video with some tips a few years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gr5ZQ4Db38

[Lindon]

@David-Healey said in Taking my Mailing list seriously, so a first question....:

@Lindon Use Amazon SES, it's the cheapest and it's reliable.

Combine this with a good CRM, I really like FluentCRM because it's reasonably priced, has lots of good features, and integrates with other WP plugins I'm using.

wow even trying to get a simple price out of Amazon SES is complicated.....

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon For our level of usage, SES pricing is basically negligible. From their examples, 250,000 emails per month is about $25/mo.

It's only really when you get into sending millions of emails per month, and/or sending very large emails, that price starts to become a factor.

Since I use Gumroad, sending emails to my list is included in their revenue cut. I can essentially send as many emails as I like and pay no more for it than the usual cut.

Having said that, this year I'll be looking to move away from Gumroad to selling direct on my own website, so I'm interested to see how this conversation goes.

[David Healey]

@Lindon It's cheap cheap cheap, I sent about 100k emails last month and it cost about $12

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon You could also look at Sendy. I bought a license a while ago but not got around to setting it up yet.

It's a one-time $69 fee and you self-host it, so another few dollars a month for a small shared server.

It sends using SES at $1 per 10,000 emails.

https://sendy.co

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in Taking my Mailing list seriously, so a first question....:

You could also look at Sendy.

Looks like it's just for newsletters though rather than automated marketing?

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon I should also clarify that I run ads too. I do £40/day in one campaign with 4 ads, all on Instagram.

I haven't emailed my list since November last year, and the last email before that was August. So the consistent revenue I'm getting now is mostly ad-based rather than mailing list-based.

However, I still swear by the mailing and will be working to build it up more this year.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey It's got some nice features like campaigns, webhooks, autoresponders, etc. But like I say, I haven't dug into it yet. I bought the license on a deal, more out of curiosity.

Newsletters is basically just marketing emails under a slightly nicer name.

Autoresponders
Automate your marketing by setting up a series of emails in drip campaigns to automatically follow up with your subscribers at time intervals you set. Or send emails annually or one off emails at a specific date. Keep your subscribers engaged and your brand at the top of their mind.

Rules & Webhooks
Decide what happens when something happens - by creating 'Rules'. For example, setup a rule to get notified by email when a scheduled campaign starts sending, trigger a webhook when an autoresponder is sent, unsubscribe someone from a list when they're signed up to another, and so on.

Custom fields
Create custom fields to store more than just 'name' and 'email'. Not only can you store more information about your subscribers, you can use them for list segmentation or personalization tags in your newsletters for a more personalized experience.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in Taking my Mailing list seriously, so a first question....:

marketing emails under a slightly nicer name

Kind of, but I like proper automation with node based tools to build out logic flows for sending emails.

This kind of thing

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Yeah, I don't ever see myself doing that amount of automation. It feels too forced and contrived to me.

I've tried it before with different products (non-music related) and I ended up spending more time endlessly tweaking campaigns than actually making the product better. We used Mailchimp, Autopilot, Integromat/Make

My strategy over the last 3 years has been quite sparse:

Products: one launch email with a time-limited discount code, then one reminder email 2-3 days before the code ends.

Marketing: maximum one email per month with a product-specific discount code, only sent to those that don't own the product.

On top of that I've sent out a couple of cross-sell discount codes ("Since you own Product X you might like 20% off Product Y") and a DAW survey.

I do have it on my list to send out a post-purchase email, something like "Hope you enjoy Product X, here's a 20% discount code for your next purchase". It's easy to set up in Gumroad, just haven't got around to it yet. It would be very easy to measure the performance too.