Ed & Phoebe Swinger
Phoebe and I wanted to put a newsletter out each month with updates, and goings on. It sounded like a great idea. Another way to keep in contact with our listeners, and a direct-to-email ability instead of the passive Twitter and Instagram approach. With our Costa Rica takeover this coming June it seemed like a natural fit.
I looked around and MailChimp seemed to be the best way to go. They had a free account, and it seems to be the industry standard for direct mail marketing these days. I signed up and added the plugin to our site. I even figured out how to add the MailChimp tags into the contact form and turned on their banner widget.
Then I started discovering the darker side of the free account. Yes, you can build a template, but no you can’t use their templates or free templates off the web. Also setting up a monthly mailing seemed to be either a huge pain or not available in the free account. Either way, I got frustrated and quit trying.
Fast forward to today… I start assembling a template and ta-da, I notice the Mailing address at the bottom of the template. Uh-oh. Turns out to meet the spam requirements we have to provide a physical address in the email footer. So if we wanted to send all our listeners our home address we’d be golden. Otherwise, we would have to rent a PO box… phooey. No more mail chimp.
