I need to send about 2000 emails out to an organization.

All the contact data is in an Excel file.

There's a number of services out there - Constant Contact and Mailchimp seem to be two big ones.

What are your thoughts on the best way to do this? I'd like to sign up for a free trial, send this one mailing, and then get out.

You could learn so much from Lex.

It depends what you need to get from this - do you want to track stats like open rates? Either of those are sufficient. I have found MailChimp to be more user friendly and I think 2,000 records falls below their free account threshold.

Alternatively, Outlook has a mail merge feature. I don't know about the stat tracking there but I didn't care when I used to use it.

Lastly, if there's no personalization in the emails (eg. Dear _____, with their name dropped into the blank), then you could drop about 50 email addresses at a time into BCC of your regular email client and crank them out that way.

ETA: you CAN BCC up to 500 people per email with most email providers, but I suggested 50 instead because the higher volumes will trigger spam filters.

thanks. no personalization, but I'd rather not cut and paste over and over again.

Martin Q. Blank said:

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Bravo!

For emphasis, use CAPSLOCK and several exclamation points!!!!

Surely there are a few Nigerian princes who may be able to help you.

Use an excel formula to concatenate all the emails, separated by semicolons.

Split 'em into groups of 500 like suggested above.

Copy and paste them into the BCC field, send however many emails you need, in your case 4 emails.

Don't think it needs to be any more complex than that.