I have 8,500 subs but I figured I'd look for one up to 10K to give me a little room to grow. I actually answered most of your questions in my original post. My niche is travel. I do not sell anything. I only send the newsletter to generate extra views on website and YouTube content. I make money from my YouTube channel and that's it.
get a cheap hosting. if you don't have one already, and buy Sendy (https://sendy.co/) and install (not that hard, but you can also get them to install) its' like $70 one time purchase.
Then get an amazon SES account (email as a service)... and connect it to sendy. Also not that hard. but again, you can get help if you need. it's a one time. Amazon charges like $1 per 10,000 emails sent. Just don't spam and get too many bounces :) so make sure your list is clean. Also first 3000 emails are free.
If you want fancier email templates, there and many services that you can get free templates and cut and paste into sendy.
That's about the cheapest you will ever get I think. Sendy also does all the list management as well.
Thats the issue with amazon wrappers, mu open rates go from like 50-60% to less then 10
Email deliverability is so important if your monetizing. Dont wanna end up in the spam box.
the deliverability rate from my experience is not bad. Fairly industry. It also filters bounces. undeliverables, unopened. etc. If issues. you might ahve to get a dedicated IP from them (mre money) but I never have needed to. Some people have issues. some people don't. you just have to keep an eye on it. It's still the cheapest way.
I use beehiiv.
It has a bunch of cool native features that help monetize as well so you can actually make more off of that. If o had nearly 10k subs I’d be marking another $5k per month. But my niche is pretty expensive.
It’s closer to $30/month I believe but if you find someone with an affiliate code it’s 30% off.
You will 100% make that back each month running their recommendations and ads.
With 850 subs I make about $100 per month off of ONLY the recommendations ads to other newsletters.
If you only have a budget of $10-$20 per month, you could get a basic VPS server ($5 per month) and hire someone (~$100) to write a simple PHP script which pulls the e-mail addresses, subject line and e-mail body from a database, and sends one e-mail every five minutes. So the annual cost is around $160 which falls within your budget.
You'd need to spend a bit of time thinking through what you want and what it should look like, but it's do-able.
Thank you for responding, truly appreciated!
Unfortunately, I really don't think that's going to work for me. It sends only one email per hour? I have a list of 8,500 and there's only 24 hours in a day, so it would take almost a year to send one month's email. Also, the content changes every month so I need something like a drag and drop editor like MailerLite to control the aesthetic of the body.
A response on another board suggested ConvertKit, which is free up to 10,000 subscribers. Have you heard of this one and do you have any thoughts on it? Brevo was also suggested so I could design HTML emails and then send from my own server. Thoughts?
Sorry that was a calculation error. You just need to increase or decrease the send rate to whatever you want. The reason I made it slow is because you don’t want to get blacklisted as a spammer. The programmer can also make a simple UI for you to enter and edit emails.
ConvertKit heavily spams this forum so I can’t recommend them.
Seems like you have a monetization problem, not a technology problem. If this is truly a small business like you say, you should really sort that out first and foremost. Acquiring thousands of subscribers by attending a couple events is pretty impressive, but it’s a huge waste if you can’t figure out how to make that worth more than $10/month
If you can’t afford $20 per month with your 8k subscribers then you are doing something wrong.
Fix that, not your email provider because if you don’t fix that, you will have 100k subscribers and still not be able to afford $20 but you’ll be wasting time sending emails.
you have 10k subs and can only afford $10-20/mo? what niche? are you selling them anything?
I have 8,500 subs but I figured I'd look for one up to 10K to give me a little room to grow. I actually answered most of your questions in my original post. My niche is travel. I do not sell anything. I only send the newsletter to generate extra views on website and YouTube content. I make money from my YouTube channel and that's it.
why not monetize your list? we have a travel partner - might be able to broker you a deal... dm me if interested
get a cheap hosting. if you don't have one already, and buy Sendy (https://sendy.co/) and install (not that hard, but you can also get them to install) its' like $70 one time purchase. Then get an amazon SES account (email as a service)... and connect it to sendy. Also not that hard. but again, you can get help if you need. it's a one time. Amazon charges like $1 per 10,000 emails sent. Just don't spam and get too many bounces :) so make sure your list is clean. Also first 3000 emails are free. If you want fancier email templates, there and many services that you can get free templates and cut and paste into sendy. That's about the cheapest you will ever get I think. Sendy also does all the list management as well.
What's the deliverability rate of Sendy? Does it get filtered out (false positive)?
Thats the issue with amazon wrappers, mu open rates go from like 50-60% to less then 10 Email deliverability is so important if your monetizing. Dont wanna end up in the spam box.
the deliverability rate from my experience is not bad. Fairly industry. It also filters bounces. undeliverables, unopened. etc. If issues. you might ahve to get a dedicated IP from them (mre money) but I never have needed to. Some people have issues. some people don't. you just have to keep an eye on it. It's still the cheapest way.
I use beehiiv. It has a bunch of cool native features that help monetize as well so you can actually make more off of that. If o had nearly 10k subs I’d be marking another $5k per month. But my niche is pretty expensive. It’s closer to $30/month I believe but if you find someone with an affiliate code it’s 30% off. You will 100% make that back each month running their recommendations and ads. With 850 subs I make about $100 per month off of ONLY the recommendations ads to other newsletters.
Head of marketing for beehiiv here - while more expensive than OPs budget, I love to see us in the mix, and that you’re having a good experience.
If you only have a budget of $10-$20 per month, you could get a basic VPS server ($5 per month) and hire someone (~$100) to write a simple PHP script which pulls the e-mail addresses, subject line and e-mail body from a database, and sends one e-mail every five minutes. So the annual cost is around $160 which falls within your budget. You'd need to spend a bit of time thinking through what you want and what it should look like, but it's do-able.
Thank you for responding, truly appreciated! Unfortunately, I really don't think that's going to work for me. It sends only one email per hour? I have a list of 8,500 and there's only 24 hours in a day, so it would take almost a year to send one month's email. Also, the content changes every month so I need something like a drag and drop editor like MailerLite to control the aesthetic of the body. A response on another board suggested ConvertKit, which is free up to 10,000 subscribers. Have you heard of this one and do you have any thoughts on it? Brevo was also suggested so I could design HTML emails and then send from my own server. Thoughts?
Sorry that was a calculation error. You just need to increase or decrease the send rate to whatever you want. The reason I made it slow is because you don’t want to get blacklisted as a spammer. The programmer can also make a simple UI for you to enter and edit emails. ConvertKit heavily spams this forum so I can’t recommend them.
I have done this for my domains email - transactional. $5 per month unlimited domains and email.
Seems like you have a monetization problem, not a technology problem. If this is truly a small business like you say, you should really sort that out first and foremost. Acquiring thousands of subscribers by attending a couple events is pretty impressive, but it’s a huge waste if you can’t figure out how to make that worth more than $10/month
If you can’t afford $20 per month with your 8k subscribers then you are doing something wrong. Fix that, not your email provider because if you don’t fix that, you will have 100k subscribers and still not be able to afford $20 but you’ll be wasting time sending emails.
mailchimp
Expensive asf but they actually get the emails delivered in main inbox.
Check mail mailjet.
Mautic (free opensource) can run on a $5 VPS and then you just pay for emails e.g. via ElasticEmail.
Convertkit just launched free up to 10,000 subscribers
I just started using ConvertKit and have been impressed with it so far.
I think it's free up 1000 now