About 6 times a year, I send out emails to my 800 plus client list re: shows and workshops. I usually send them in groups of about 20-30 clients.

More and more frequently, the emails are getting rejected/greylisted because the client firewalls are set too high. I am considering using a email mailing programme like Mailchimp to do this for me. These programs apparently simulate the atmosphere of a single email going out thus avoiding being dumped into spam.

Does anyone have experience doing this already? So that I don't have to retype and recreate my entire client list in this programme, I would like to export it from Working Artist.

Is there a way to export my client list/client emails to excel or to a text delineated file so that I can import it directly into Mailchimp?

Shirleyart

Hi Shirleyart,

Mass emailing can be kind of tricky. Problems can occur at a couple of levels...

1. You can have mail rejected by the patron's email provider because it's flagged as spam. This usually happens when too many emails are sent from one source. If you think that that's your problem, you should consider contacting your email provider because, usually, 20-30 emails at a time wouldn't trigger an ISP spam flag. There are a variety of reasons that this could be happening. It could also be that your patron's email providers have their spam settings set unusually low. Also, sending 20-30 at a time may end up being too many if you send too many groups too close together.

2. Clients may have their spam filters set to quarantine certain emails, and yours are getting caught in that trap. That's different than firewall settings, by the way.

Sometimes, providers such as MailChimp, or Constant Contact, and the like, are successful in delivering more emails because ISPs are familiar with the source of those emails and are more likely to let them through. Part of what you're paying for is for these providers to keep up those relationships so that more of your emails get through.

If you'd like to use one of those services, it's fairly easy to export data from your mailing lists in a delimited text file. Look in Mail Lists under Reports and you'll see reports that do what you want.

Thanks and have a good day.

Ron
WorkingArtist

Thanks Ron. I will try to do an data export and let you know if I have any problems.

Hi Ron,
I finally tried it and it doesn't seem to work for me. I went to Mail Lists/, Reports/ and tried both Tab delimited and Comma Delimited/name. When I saved them as the program requested as a doc, I get a list of names and addresses with lots of commas but no emails in the list....that is probably why the list is not usable in Mailchimp. Any other help you can give would be appreciated.

Shirleyart

Please see the response that I sent to your support request