One of the most important things a musician needs at their marketing disposal is a mailing list and for a long time I’ve just been using the groups function on open source email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird to manage my mailing list however, this has been a bit limiting especially when I’m sending out emails in bulk.

Thunderbird (or my ISP for that matter) wouldn’t let me do it.

Now that I’m using a Mac I thought using Apple Mail would be different but even now I can’t send out more than 20 emails at a time without getting the appropriate error messages and having the whole emailing exercise grind to a halt.

I needed a better way to manage my email list.

About 18 months ago I tried to install phpList, an open source email management system, but it seemed I needed a degree in rocket science to work it all out so I quickly gave up on that idea.

There were other email management systems that I knew about such as AWeber and Constant Contact but they cost a lot of money and I wanted to try something out first before handing over a monthly fee to a company.

Then I stumbled across MailChimp.

I heard about MailChimp through a friend of mine about a year ago. I checked it out and man, I was impressed. All the information I was after and the answers I was looking for were written in plain English and the instructional videos are very well made and easy to follow.

It took me a while to gather up the courage to use MailChimp but I thought… “New year, new email management system.”

So I went for it.

At the moment I have transferred both my Corey Stewart Online and Open Mic Network mailing lists over to MailChimp and I’ve just installed a signup form in the right sidebar of my site.

The beauty of using an email management system such as MailChimp is that they handle all of the emailing for you, none of this sending out emails in batches of 20 like I had to do pre MailChimp.

Another thing that I love about MailChimp is the reports you can generate. With a click of a button I know how many people have opened their email, what links have been clicked on and what emails are bounce-backs (which are cleaned out of the list automatically).

All lists are opt-in and the email confirmation and “thank you for subscribing” pages are handled by MailChimp as well.

The best part about MailChimp is that they have a free forever account which allows a 1000 subscriber and 6000 emails/month limit on my activity which is plenty for me at this time.

For more information go to the MailChimp website. in the meantime if you want to sign up for my mailing list please fill out the form provided in the right sidebar and click the subscribe button and you’ll be kept up to date on news and gigging information.

Peace,

Corey

Related articles

• Why I Chose MailChimp Over Aweber (wassupblog.com)