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Robin T., Tennessee

I use MailChimp because it’s free. Same thing… just free. You can schedule your emails, have lists, it has templates for you and will pull colors from your website to make it “match” for branding purposes. It also automatically posts to FB and Twitter (if you want) and will let you see who has opened it, when they opened it, if they forwarded it to anyone, etc.

Another feature allows you to create “sign up” forms that you can embed into your website or whatever you like. I’ve used that on my website as well as on my Living Social Deal landing page to allow people to sign up for more info or register for lessons.

I’ve looked at Constant Contact, but couldn’t see the benefit in paying the monthly fee. I recently attended a Social Media seminar and they recommended Constant Contact if you have over 1,000 contacts to email to…. if you don’t have that many, they suggested MailChimp because it’s FREE up to 1,000 contacts (I think… it may be more).

Mark M., New York

I started using AWeber nearly 3 years ago after researching email marketing options. They seemed like they might have a bit of an edge over Constant Contact in various respects with functionality. My experience with them has been very good. Lots of good functionality, reasonably easy to use, very powerful and customizable, etc. Very good customer service, too.

That said, my primary reason for signing up with any email marketing service at the time was not managing a piano lesson newsletter but other things I’m involved with like my original music. And over time, it became clear that my priorities are simply not (for now) in investing in those areas of my life enough to make it worth continuing to pay AWeber for the service. I just don’t use it enough to get sufficient return on the expense.

I did more research to find a less expensive alternative. Through that research, it became clear that even today the consensus seems to be in favor of AWeber over Constant Contact. But I was looking for a cheaper or free alternative.

So just in the last several weeks, I switched to MailChimp. Allowing 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly message sends for free, and with a lot of good functionality and user-friendliness, it probably is the most desirable free option for mailing lists out there.

If all you want to do is a piano newsletter to a relatively small subscriber base, and especially if you are starting from scratch and not having to transition from any other particular email newsletter service, MailChimp will be an excellent choice, likely indefinitely.

Terry S., Arizona

Constant Contact is popular – also getresponse.com and aweber.com. Most are fairly easy to use and make sending professional-looking emails to groups of people easy. I also use mailchimp.com mostly because it offers a free “autoresponder.” This is a valuable tool which allows me to send “pre-done” emails to my students on preset dates automatically. Autoresponders can be valuable to keep in touch with students or prospects.

John N., Missouri

I’m with Robin and Mark. MailChimp is free and works just as well as Constant Contact. My wife does web/e-mail work for a large dance studio here and swears by it, too.

Terah W., Kansas

Mailchimp seems to be the leading favorite. That being said, the response was great and there are lots of good options out there and I know way more than I did. Will be checking out MailChimp.
Thanks so much, all!

Mark M., New York

It’s a good question. But I’m not sure that that’s the reason I do it. I mostly do it so that I can provide information quickly and easily to everyone and not always have to spend lesson time doing that. Yes, that means “unpaid” time on my part. But let’s face it, we all do all sorts of things “unpaid,” and none of it is really unpaid, we just know that all that work is included in tuition. I personally like being able to deliver certain information that way instead of in class.

I also use the same mailing list mechanism for administrative things, not just practice advice or music-related YouTube videos, etc. Some administrative stuff is also, I feel, worth doing outside of lesson time, and it’s far easier to do it with a mailing list service than to just send a regular email with lots of recipients, not to mention it gets around the whole To: vs. Bcc: issue that’s inevitable when you try to send mass emails from a regular email account.