
Ask HN: How do large companies send newsletters to massive email lists? - SnowingXIV
Managing a list of subscribers below 2k is fine though pretty expensive once you exceed 2k. What if a company is looking at using their client list that has around 200k and using a service like mailchimp, sendinblue, etc absolutely wouldn&#x27;t work given the limitations and price.<p>Ideally I wouldn&#x27;t want to jeopardize any IPs or domains. I also don&#x27;t want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on this either.<p>So maybe break it up into parts. How are folks handling email lists of 2k, 5k, 10k, 200k and whatever process massive corp X does to handle email lists of M+.
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snowwrestler
I have used the Salesforce service formerly known as ExactTarget to send
emails to 6-figure lists. Other ET clients have included Microsoft, Apple, the
Republican National Committee, etc. I've also used Marketo and Emma to send
emails to 5-figure lists.

Mailchimp's pricing tool tells me that 200k subscribers will cost $875/month
for up to 2.4 million emails sent. I will tell you that that is a fraction of
the cost my employers have paid for the above platforms.

The thing to understand is that it is expensive to _reliably_ send high
volumes of email. Anyone can send high volumes of email if they don't care how
many go into the spam folder. Sending spam is cheap. Sending email so that
every single one gets to the inbox is expensive.

Why? Because to send high volumes of email reliably, you have to follow
elaborate steps to prove that you're not sending spam. That means building
lists through opt-in only, using clean IP addresses, warming up the IP
addresses over time with progressively larger successful sends, aligning
domain names across header fields and content links, applying every type of
email authentication, hooking into common recipient feedback paths, monitoring
and dealing with blacklist services, etc.

If you just want to slam a ton of emails out the door, and have some technical
capability, you can save money using a "dumb" mail sending platform like
Mailgun, Sendgrid, Amazon SES, etc. But you won't necessarily get "marketing"
type features like link tracking, engagement reporting, responsive templates,
etc. It does look like Sendgrid can give you a lot of that stuff for 200k
contacts, for about half the cost of Mailchimp.

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SnowingXIV
Appreciate the detailed response, I was curious if they did it in house and
seems like they don't and Salesforce is pretty prevalent.

Looking into sendgrid. It's not super important that they all make it there
and if it takes a few hours that's not an issue either. Trying to do a monthly
newsletter but to a large list that I have broken up between groups. My
biggest fear even after doing a mailchimp campaign was being flagged for spam
and that then the domain would have problems sending actual emails to business
contacts, partners, clients, etc and working with blacklists. Even worse if
the IP is flagged for issues.

Sendgrid pricing looks fair but mailchimp was super slick as far as platform
goes. Maybe the route is to buy a new domain that's similar like a previous
commenter suggested and sign up with this to blast the 200k. I actually have a
domain name that is very similar I'm not not using and that domain redirects
to the main site + all those emails get forwarded to the real emails (some
people make the mistake of sending to it). It simply has another word at the
end.

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Spooky23
Getting email delivered to inboxes costs money and requires care. If mailchimp
seems out of the ballpark from a cost point of view, that’s a signal that you
shouldn’t be sending massive email campaigns.

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ecesena
Sending email to many people means there can be errors in sending, and it will
be read on many different client and devices.

Mailchimp offers you a reliable way to send, and templates that are pretty
well tested. In addition to many more features including sending email at the
"right time" for the user.

If your problem is only money, and you can trade it for time to deliver, then
there are SaaS like Mailup with a different business model, that charge you
for speed. You can send to 200k users for free but it will take a lot of time.

Next, if you want to save more money and you can build your own template, you
can set up a tool like Sendy which is basically a self-hosted (very)
simplified mailchimp. That can be used with Amazon SES, or Sendgrid. If you're
scared about your domain, just buy one that looks similar enough and open an
AWS account in another region.

Finally, you can build your own, including integrating in your analytics
tools, etc. Again, I'd use SES or Sendgrid or similar, instead of managing my
own SMTP server, which is an operational nightmare.

(I have no experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, that others are
referring.)

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sethammons
Disclaimer, I work with SendGrid. That is what the whole ESP space is about.
Check out some of the players, and pick one you like. You should spend
dramatically less on a service such as SendGrid than you would spend on
personnel to handle all the ins and outs of email deliverability.

~~~
SnowingXIV
I'm liking the pricing with you guys, I have a list of contacts currently
around 5k that will probably take awhile to grow to 10k that I wouldn't mind
paying $10/m to send monthly emails to. Now again I want to send a warm "open"
to them to update their subscription settings and whatnot but since many may
be a little old (we rarely sent emails except direct correspondence) I'm super
concerned about people hitting "mark as spam" and it becoming an abuse
complaint resulting in domain blacklists. I did a 2k run on an actual
newsletter with mailchimp and 4 people did that. About 19 unsub'd which is
fine. Any advice?

~~~
sethammons
We have a lot of posts that talk about avoiding being flagged as spam, such
as:

[https://sendgrid.com/blog/10-tips-to-keep-email-out-of-
the-s...](https://sendgrid.com/blog/10-tips-to-keep-email-out-of-the-spam-
folder/)

These kinds of articles will be able to provide better advice than I can in a
comment thread. One tip, if it is in the budget, is to have two sending IPs.
One for transactional mail and one for newsletters. This will let you keep
your transactional mail's IP's reputation higher.

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pradeepkota
I am having a site which provides information regarding properties in
Hyderabad [https://propertyadviser.in/](https://propertyadviser.in/), For
promotion of site I am looking for sending bulk e mails suggest me a site for
this.

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Samon
We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget) for multiple lists
totalling around 2M subscribers.

