We all receive more email than we know what to do with. I receive a lot of email from other missionaries sharing their update letters. I love reading those letters and hearing about how the Lord is using my friends around the world.

Unfortunately, my friends who send a massive BCC email have no clue how many people are actually opening their emails. Knowing who is reading about your ministry (or group, company or organization) is incredibly valuable. My favorite service for large group e-mailing is MailChimp. It simply blows normal emailing out of the water, and it’s incredibly easy to use.

Here’s why:

1. You know who is most interested and invested in what you’re doing. You see every person who has opened your email, what links they’ve clicked on and how many times they opened it. Data is awesome.

2. You know the first people to contact when you want to invite new people to join your group, team or organization. We filtered our email contacts from last year and decided who to invite to hear more about our ministry by seeing who read our e-updates the most often. We saw nearly $300 in monthly support come in from contacting the right people and inviting those who were already supporting us and receiving both email and paper copies of our letter (for various reasons) to increase their giving.

3. You know if what you’re writing is working. If people aren’t reading your paper letter, you don’t know. If they aren’t reading your electronic one, you’ll know. It helps you fine tune headlines and figure out the best time of the day and week to send your e-newsletter.

4. You can significantly expand your mailing list for free. With MailChimp, you can have up to 2,000 subscribers and send out 12,000 mailings per month (that’s 6 mailings to all of your 2,000 subscribers) for free. We send our snail mail letter to about 300 people. Obviously MailChimp is easier, cheaper and faster (but don’t ever stop sending hard copies because it’s definitely worth it).

5. You can send it out in the future. I have strong convictions about making sure those who give to our ministry are the first informed. That means I wait to send our electronic newsletter out one week after our hard copy letter. However, I edit and compose both on the same day, and just use MailChimp’s scheduled email feature to send it out later.

6. You know what to tweak. Originally, I spent too much time trying to write a quick overview of what was happening for our email newsletter (that traditionally fewer people read as it is) which then linked to a PDF of our actually newsletter. Practically no one ever downloaded our actual newsletter (I could see that from the link data MailChimp provides). I needed to change something because it took too long to write an introduction and no one was reading the PDF newsletter. I changed our format (you can see both below, old at the top, new below). We get just as many opens now as we did before, but it takes me less time and more people are seeing the real content of our letters.

7. People can unsubscribe easily. Sometimes people who don’t want our letters any more have to write awkward emails or get frustrated every time they receive it. Not anymore. They can click a link and unsubscribe easily, no awkward email necessary.

8. It’s easy for new people to subscribe. You can share a link on Facebook, Twitter, or via email for anyone to subscribe. Simple and convenient.

Click here to set up your free MailChimp account.

Question: Do you use any service like MailChimp? What other questions do you have about MailChimp?