Clattertron

[dc]A[/dc]fter a lot of thought, I decided to bring back the Clattertron Newsletter, which went dark back in November.

However, I’m dropping TinyLetter and switching to MailChimp (who amusingly enough, owns TinyLetter).

Why I Switched to MailChimp

I enjoyed TinyLetter, I really did. TinyLetter is a simple, low-bandwidth solution for sending out newsletters—and it doesn’t claim to be anything more. I loved these aspects, at first, but the more I stuck with my weekly newsletter, the more the limitations became annoying quirks and the newsletters became a tedious task.

I realized, I wanted more options for layouts, customizing, and delivery.

Newsletters On a Schedule

My main beef with TinyLetter was I couldn’t upload a newsletter and schedule it for delivery (like I do for comic and blog posts here). If I wanted to send my newsletter out each Sunday, I could save it as a draft earlier in the week, but would still have to manually click Send on Sunday.

Manually sending my newsletters meant they rarely went out at the same time each week, which could hurt readership—and some times, I forgot until later in the day.

MailChimp will send my email newsletters (called campaigns) at a scheduled time, which was a big win.

Newsletter Formatting

Writing a newsletter, and adding formatting, in TinyLetter was a bit of chore. The simple CMS made formatting a challenge at times, especially when it came to images.

My work-around then became formatting my newsletters here, in a new blog post, saving the work as a draft, then copy and pasting the HTML into TinyLetter.

I rarely compose the text of long posts in a content management system (CMS) and do all the original writing in OpenOffice, so my workflow was actually:

• Write the newsletter in OpenOffice.
• Edit.
• Paste the newsletter text into a new WordPress blog post.
• Add links, images, and other formatting.
• Spell-check and edit again.
• Switch to HTML view, copy all the post’s HTML.
• Go to TinyLetter, paste the HTML code into a new newsletter.
• Switch back to regular view and hope the formatting worked (it didn’t always).
• Save the newsletter as a draft, manually send on Sunday.

Granted, these were self-inflicted wounds, because I wanted to add images and such, and go beyond the simple idea of TinyLetter.

MailChimp, however, has a much nicer—and easier to use—CMS. I haven’t spent much time playing around, but what I did try went smoothly, and the templates were easy to customize.

Other MailChimp Thoughts

The customizing options available through MailChimp are great, and I’m still figuring out how much I want to do. I want to keep my newsletters simple, but also make them interesting (I had a really good open/click rate with TinyLetter).

MailChimp, like TinyLetter, is still free. Sorta. If/when I get over 2,000 subscribers, I will have to pay. A good problem to have, I think.

You can sign up for the new Clattertron Newsletter using the form below (or click here). I thought about importing all of my TinyLetter subscribers into MailChimp, but I felt like I should not (I will send out one last TinyLetter letting subscribers know of the change though).