After nine years and 10 million (that's right) emails sent, CityNews is switching off of Constant Contact. We migrated our CountyNews publication a couple months ago, but this is now a wholesale switch for us, we hope you like it.
A few of the reasons are outlined below, for those of you interested in the newsletter biz. Suffice to say this is to improve our daily operations and make sure you get your content on time.
Among the leading reasons for the switch, email throttling. We are blessed with nearly 10,000 subscribers to our newsletter, and it turns out if 2,000 of you click a link at the same time our website has issues. We tried to fix this on the website end, but the better fix is to break our newsletters down into a few batches, a few minutes apart, to throttle the traffic. Mailchimp lets us do this, Constant Contact doesn't.
We also think MailChimp is just a bit better on the development side. They have better support of feeds form our site for job listings and the UI is just maybe 10% smoother. Constant Contact is catching them on this, and they were lousy for years, but it's not really a deal breaker. Neither is pricing, it's about the same.
Lastly, MailChimp is also giving us better insights into what our readers like, and how to give them more of it. We'd like to hear that from you too! We're always happy to talk about how we're doing what we do, and good stories from anywhere in local government.
Write us anytime. And thanks for reading.