

Ask HN: Best method for one time e-mail to subscribers, and results to expect - Throwaway90283

Hi HN, I have e-mail addresses for the members on one of my sites, and about 500,000 of them haven&#x27;t been active in the past few months. I&#x27;ve never sent an e-mail before, but I was thinking about e-mailing everyone, mentioning improvements to the service, and trying to get them to return. A couple of questions...<p>1. Any recommendations for a platform to send 500,000 e-mails? MailChimp credits would run $0.005 per e-mail, or $2,500. I&#x27;m not saying that&#x27;s too expensive, but I&#x27;m wondering if anyone has used other services with potentially cheaper prices, and the same results.<p>2. Secondly, has anyone on HN done something similar before (mass e-mailing users that have stopped using a service), and if so, did you see positive results? What percentage of users returned to the site through the e-mail? 1&#x2F;10, 1&#x2F;100, 1&#x2F;1000? I have no idea what to expect, so I&#x27;m curious to hear some stories. Either way, I&#x27;ll start small with 1,000 or 10,000 e-mails, and monitor the results. I&#x27;d need to see maybe 1&#x2F;150 of those e-mails converting into a user that returns to the site for at least a year. Seems plausible.
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Throwaway90283
I was looking into this a little bit more, and Amazon SES seems incredibly
cost effective at $50 for 500,000 e-mails. I'll just have to write some simple
code to batch e-mails through the Amazon API, which works on my end because
I'm looking for a one-time, no frills e-mail, and don't need all the contact
list and management software that goes with it. Also, tracking is easy enough,
and I can query my database to find the percentage of users that returned to
the site and logged in. Any experiences with Amazon SES?

