I’m drowning in options here and would appreciate some insight from the collective.
We recently moved our website and membership system from a hosted service to a WordPress/MemberPress/etc. setup that gives us the flexibility we need.
Currently our site’s SMTP is using SendGrid because that’s what the web developer was familiar with, and we already had an account with them as that’s what the hosted system uses. The problem with that is, our lower service tier was on a shared IP that was blocked by Microsoft services for spamming, and SendGrid’s only solution was to sell us a higher tier with private IP. Shady AF, but at the time, it was the most efficient option to get things going.
We’re also using Constant Contact for newsletters and similar types of communication; we mainly started with that for doing online voting for the annual AGM and put the account in maintenance mode at $10/mo for the rest of the year. While their support has always been good, their pricing is based on the number of contacts, and the size of our membership/contact list is large enough (10,000+) to put us in a middle tier, which means we’re probably paying more than it’s worth for an average of a mailing a month.
So the first conundrum is, I’m looking at some of WP Mail SMTP’s built-in options for SMTP, and wondering if anyone has any particular experience/praise/warnings with any of them. While our contact list is just over 10,000, there are about 4-5k active members at any one time, meaning around 400-500 monthly reminder emails and the occasional newsletter, probably at most 20,000 emails going out per month. The “Recommended” ones are Sendinblue, SendLayer, and [SMTP.com]).
I’d also like to move to a newsletter plugin for WP to bring that internal. In particular, while newsletters usually go out to all 10,000 contacts, sometimes I need to send ONLY to active paid members, or ONLY to a few hundred on a particular segment list. When I do this in Constant Contact, I need to export that list and then import it into CC. It would be nice if that integrated directly with our membership database. Any suggestions for that?
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