One of our favorite tools for startups is called Sendy. It’s paid product that runs on a web server and uses Amazon’s SES mail service to send mass emails from your own domain.
We are not huge fans of mass email – a one-on-one approach to sales is best – but sometimes you need to get the word out. Rather then spend hundreds on Mailchimp and the like we love to be able to be in complete control of our mail lists, our server, and our domains.
The system is very simple. You buy the software at Sendy.co and set it up on your webserver. We like to give Sendy instances their own subdomain like mail.XYZ.com or sendy.XYZ.com.
Next you create an Amazon AWS and grab an API key for SES. This also requires you to confirm your mail domain. All of that is explained in the wizard Sendy shows you as soon as you start it up.
How cheap is it? Let’s take a look at our dashboard:
That’s 30,000 emails in a day sent to our contacts. What does that cost?
Yep. That’s right. $3.19. For the price of a latte we kept in touch with our customers.
It’s amazing tool and a great cost cutter. Our concerns? We don’t have many but sometimes spam filters grab emails sent via SES, resulting in a low open rate. That said, you’re still getting great service that you control and that you don’t pay hundreds a month for.
Image via Shutterstock.
