Cost effective email distribution

[doublezer6]

I am starting an online-based business and have an email distribution list of just shy of 2500 emails that I have put together for my niche industry. I do expect that list to grow organically in the coming months, but starting out a marketing campaign I am stuck on the best way to email these contacts en masse cost effectively.

Also, to be clear, this is not going to be spammy. I just need to be able to send the occasional email (once every week or two) to a list of about 2500 people starting out.

Any suggestions from those of you that have dealt with similar sized lists before?

[SeattleCPA]

My list isn't that big... not even half that big... and I use the list for a monthly-ish newsletter for blog readers.

But I'm pretty happy with mailchimp. We under utilize its features...

[bluewater]

Not an expert but have also been looking into email marketing recently.  You mention an email distribution list but the big question is whether or not that is an opt in list.  I'm guessing when you say you put it together that you more or less found these emails and are looking to do cold outreach.  You will quickly get shutdown by Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc. Spammy seems to be tough to define but sending an unsolicited weekly email would probably fall into the spammy category in my book.  Every time I research this myself I'm not sure what's SPAM or not.  Little bit of googling led me to a few useful articles, with the last recommending specific services.  Good luck!

https://www.singlegrain.com/email-marketing/the-10-minute-guide-to-cold-email-campaigns-for-marketers/

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/04/stop-read-this-before-you-send-another-cold-email.html

https://www.quora.com/What-service-provider-do-you-use-for-your-cold-email-campaigns

[webguy]

I use ConvertKit (https://convertkit.com/) and have been happy with it so far. I have a list of about 50,000 so it’s not cheap but for 2,500 it looks like it’s less than $50/month which seems like a good deal. Hopefully you’ll be getting far more than $50 worth of value out of your list each month.  If you’re cold emailing then I’d be careful with the initial email to make it super easy to unsubscribe and provide a lot of value so you don’t just have everyone report you as spam or unsubscribe. I’d also advise testing in small batches of 100 first so you can see how it goes. It’s not really a great idea though to bulk e-mail a bunch of people who haven’t opted in to hearing from you, and most email service providers won’t let you do that.

[MaaS]

MailChimp is your best bet IMO. Very easy to use, affordable, and has good deliverability rates. If it becomes a big business you may need more, but I wouldn't worry about that right now.

Source: I do this professionally and have worked with 40+ email platforms.