Email lists and your campus

[Eric Juden]

Hey everyone,

 

It keeps being brought up on campus that we don't have a consolidated email list of who has opted out and who actually wants to be emailed. We have a few different systems that we use for sending email to different audiences. We'd like to create a "data warehouse" (for lack of a better term) to keep a master list of everyone and not have these emails in different silos.

 

Can anyone talk about what they've done to correct this problem?

 

Thanks,

 

Eric

[Matt Herzberger]

I havent done this but I would think the smartest way would be to use something like MailChimp, Bronto, etc. To accomplish this but it would be really pricey. I know Bronto does have an agency model for lots of different groups under one institution to have there own.I dont think this is really what you were looking for but for a pure ease of implmentation I would think that would be best.

Otherwise I suppose you would have like you said a central DB and an API which each user/ email has a unique ID and they could opt from any list which would flag them at the central DB but this seems like a lot of work.

[Eric Juden]

Thanks for the reply Matt. We are in the planning stage right now. I had actually started on a database design for the central DB already, but as you said...I'm not sure I want to go down that route. I personally, would rather see us go with MailChimp or ConstantContact or something like that.

 

So maybe the answer is just having one tool that sends email instead of having multiple tools, and our problem would be solved.

[Matt Herzberger]

Yeah that would def be the easiest for use cost is prohibative. We have 44,00 current students, 6000 fac/staff and like 150K alum emails. But yeah each group having a list in a central mail platform would work best and easiet. You just have to consider the costs.