Picking your mailing list

TL;DR

• Mailchimp.com is probably the best, but their free tier is rubbish.
• Sender.net has the best free allowance, but I didn't like it.
• MailerLite.com has a decent offer and is convenient and secure.

Why bother?

I know, I know... Why should you go through the effort of making a mailing list? The extra effort of having to write regular emails as well as everything else sounds like a lot! But here is the thing... While your main objective should be to generate Steam wishlists, you may want to contact your community about certain updates or milestones, and Steam is just not good enough at that.

Here are a few more reasons:

• Not everyone will join your discord server
• You might have specific subsets of your audience, eg
  • Alpha/Beta testers
  • Press contacts
  • Competition participants

So who is best?

Ah bother... Well I suppose there isn't one best service, but I also wouldn't spend ages looking and evaluating every single mailing service out there. Pick a couple, compare their prices and features, and then just start using one. If it turns out to not be a good fit, you can still switch.

Here is what we did:

• Read a comparison blog post
• Check the free tier features
• Pick one!

We narrowed it down to three services:

Mailchimp

While arguably the most famous mailing service we discounted Mailchimp almost immediately. The free tier doesn't give us any room to grow and the upgrade costs were too high.

Sender

We actually picked sender as our initial service. It was the best package by far and would even remain free when reaching 2.5k subscribers. However after integrating it into our website I changed my mind. For starters the original email verification email they sent me went straight into my gmail spam folder (RED FLAG). They also didn't have a built-in solution for double opt-in subscriptions (a must if you need reliable data and consent in Europe for GDPR compliance). It is possible, but hard to do and therefore a big no from me.

MailerLite

After dumping Sender I found MailerLite to be very similar in its user interface, however they placed a lot more value on security and authentication which made me much happier and confident in their reliability in delivering email. Basically, if an email server sends a ton of spammy emails that server gets blocked and any other users (no matter how good their content) using the same server will also get downgraded. So a strong onboarding process from a provider is a good idea.

Conclusion

Only time will tell whether we made a good choice or whether it even matters, but we are pretty happy with our setup and hope you find a service that works for you. Good luck!

Reply to the tweet below or join our discord to chat about this further.