Attention MailChimp Email Subscribers

This post is for readers that subscribe by email and receive my MailChimp emails. Let me explain what that means and why it is necessary to address this function in a stand alone post...

Back before June of 2021, you could subscribe to Blogger blogs via a service called Feedburner. Essentially, by signing up, each time a new blog post posted to blogs you were signed up for, you would receive an email containing the post. A lot of readers found this convenient and blog authors loved that their readers would automatically be notified of a new post.

Blogger is a free platform hosted by the generous folks at Google. They host our interests and photos for free. A lot of us have been doing this for a long time, so the amount of things they store for us is HUGE! Pretty amazing, right? Well, there has to be a limit to the amount of resources that Google can allocate to Blogger, since it produces no revenue. That is why we see features disappearing slowly over time. In June of 2021, Blogger could no longer support email subscriptions through Feedburner, and so they provided bloggers the ability to export and save their list of email subscribers. This made it possible to employ other email services to notify subscribers, though it would be a manual process for the blog owners. I chose MailChimp because it was free for up to 2000 subscribers. That has now changed.

Sample Email Posts Sent

Beginning on March 10th, MailChimp will now only be free for email lists of up to 500 subscribers per mailing and 1000 emails per month. If your numbers are higher than that, the price goes up. Because my email list hovers around 1400 subscribers, and I generally send about four emails per month, my monthly fee to continue as I have will be $27/mo minimum. That is hard to swallow, since I make virtually no profit from my hobby.

I have spent a lot of time researching alternatives over the past month, and there just really aren't any. Not for free, at any rate. My best option, and the one that will serve my subscribers the best is to reduce the number of emails I send out. You see, 1400 emails per week go out, but only about 100 or so of the emails actually get opened and read. That's right - I have about a 7% read rate. To pay for 1400 subscribers when only 100 are reading is just not practical. So, what to do?

I have kept the actual readers. the ones who open the emails, from the last 90 days. It equates to about 200 or so. Beginning with this post, I will only be sending email posts to those subscribers. And, the emails will come from my personal gmail email. Gmail seems to be able to accommodate the number of subscribers and emails I send out each month and it is free. I am still keeping the option open for you to sign up for email subscriptions, you will just have to request that by sending me an email. And if you wish to stop receiving email posts, you'll have to let me know that, too: jodihippler@gmail.com

As ever, I am so delighted to connect with all of you through this amazing passion we share! You keep me inspired and motivated to reach my mini dreams, and I truly hope I do the same for you!

xo xo,

Jodi