Sooo... how do you make newsletter?
I have collected some emails from my website.
Now it's time to send emails so...
What do I do?
I wanted to go the easiest, most indie route and simply send an e-mail to everyone from my "brand" Gmail account.
But I did it to my other accounts as a test and Google marks my mails as possibly dangerous, saying "be careful, that person has never sent you an email before".
How do I ensure my emails are not marked as spam etc.?
Also, is sending mails from my Google account somehow a "no no"? I don't care about being "professional", I believe my users are 100% ok with my venture being very indie. I am just worried about my mails being negatively marked by Google.
Thoughts?
Do you have some recommendations on what should I read as a beginner? It can be technical stuff, I am a coder. In fact I prefer technicalities. Most "newsletter tutorials" focus on marketing side etc.
EDIT I also now that the first comments will be "just use a sass for that". So you can also post me some recommendations for the tools you use, but I also want to know how it works "under the hood". Imagine I want to build a newsletter sass myself.
Why are you complicating things? It seems like you want to do something for the sake of doing it. Email is as old as the internet and a lot of things were already figured out by other people, so inventing the wheel seems counter-productive.
As an example, Mailerlite (which I personally use) is free up to 1,000 subs, so if I were I would just use that, for now, to get things going. By using SAAS you remove all of the issues you asked such as emails marked as spam, they are very friendly to beginners and the set-up process will be much faster than trying to do something on your own.
Focus on newsletter content and growing your list and leave all technicalities to SAAS companies.
P.S. I also heard that Convertkit is good, but haven't used it as you have to pay from day one.
Yeah, I have this inherent problem, where I like to understand stuff. That's why my side project is about mathematics education ;)
I just found it strange that in the era of free tutorials on basically anything in tech and when everything is open sourced, making newsletters and mass email campaigns is this "forbidden knowledge" and you HAVE TO use SASS to make it work.
In the end I will obviously use sass, just like I use Heroku to host my database and codebase. But at least with Heroku I KNOW exactly what it does, how it does it and why I need it. In the case of mass email platforms, I am FORCED to use them, because I don't fully understand how what they do works and I find that deeply uncomfortable.
tl;dr - it's a mental sickness, us mathematicians have. ;)
Oh, it's not "forbidden knowledge", but it IS a Dark Art. There's so, so much to learn about email deliverability, and a lot of it is hard to learn unless you're testing at scale. Given that it's hard to learn, the companies that do know how to do it aren't especially keen on sharing that information, since it cost them a lot to find out, and now that's their competitive advantage.
That's largely why people suggest using a service as opposed to rolling your own - you'd spend so much effort just trying to figure out how to do this one thing right that you wouldn't have a lot of time left over to do your actual product.
I guess the problem is also that I am from Poland.
The prices of these SASSes might be "coffee money" for people from the west, but here they get quite expensive very fast, since we basically multiply the prices times 4, while not earning even the double of what people in the west earn.
If I was spending money left and right an all these services, I would loose a lot of money quite fast. I don't earn anything from my service yet, so I really need to be sure that I NEED this thing I am spending my money on.
Granted thought many of these mail services seem to have tree tiers, so this is a non-issue in that particular case.
By any means, I don't want to discourage you from doing that, you just have to understand "why" are you doing.
If this is something that interests you and you are not comfortable with the current market, then maybe creating something on your own that suits your needs makes sense :)
I will 100% test sass options recommended, but I also would like to know how to do it, at least in principle :)
Who knows, maybe I will have some pain points with current solutions and will come up with a new side project ;)
Use Mailchimp or SendinBlue, no point in complicating this.
If you want to build your own system, it's a good idea to use an email delivery product that handles newsletters. For this I have used Mailgun. Create a publishing/writing front-end and then use the Mailgun API to send the emails out. You can add link and open tracking over their API too.
for Open Startup List I'm using buttondown.email.
It's pretty simple to use and has a generous free tier up to 1000 subscribers :)
👋 (I run Buttondown.)
@mpodlasin, happy to answer any questions you might have!
Hey. I tried to use MailerLite, but they require me to jump through crazy hoops, like to prove that my website is actually mine, by sending an email to my custom domain email account (which I don't have) etc.
Will I have to do similar stuff in your product?
Also, your service requires me to have a very complicated password.
Where would be the safest place to store complicated passwords?
+1 for Mailerlite, we've been using it and are pretty happy about the results.
You can use a tool like Mailchimp or Mailerlite on their free tier and send this. As far as design, it's completely tool dependent, but you can find many how to's for each on youtube. It's not as complex since its all drag-and-drop. The best way to learn would be to just go in and start creating, send your self some of these newsletters.
If you want to use Gmail, then you need to pay for a tool like Gmass, which I won't even get to since you just need a free tier.