Affordable Email Marketing Options for Artists, Art Galleries, Nonprofits

Is There a More Affordable Email Option for Artists and Art Galleries?

As an artist or gallery, maintaining an email list can be essential for promoting exhibitions, new works, or upcoming events. So what to do when your subscriber count exceeds 500? If you’re using popular services like MailPoet or MailChimp, that milestone often triggers a significant price jump. For those of us who don’t even send emails monthly, paying premium fees seems excessive. So, what are the more affordable options for email marketing when your list grows beyond 500?

I’ve worked with many clients who start with the free version of MailChimp, but they eventually hit a wall when that 501st subscriber signs up. Paying $20/month for a list that only goes out once or twice a year feels like overkill.

Why Popular Options Get Expensive After 500 Subscribers

Both MailChimp and MailPoet offer free tiers, but the moment your list reaches 501 subscribers, you’ll notice steep fees. While these services are easy to use, they may not be the most budget-friendly solution for artists or any small business that doesn’t send frequent emails.

The Need for a Plugin That Connects to a 3rd Party Delivery Service

For WordPress users, a better option might be using a plugin that manages your audience and campaigns on your site but connects to a 3rd party email service for delivery. Many hosting providers struggle with plugins that use PHP’s built-in Sendmail function due to performance and spam issues. But by leveraging services like AWS SES or Mailgun, you can ensure reliable delivery without being penalized by your host. So you need 2 parts – a plugin that lives within WordPress that builds the emails and the reporting and a service from a third party (that is not your web host) that will deliver the emails.

Part 1: A Plugin to manage lists, campaigns and reporting

Here are 2 leading WordPress plugins that can handle audience management while connecting to more affordable 3rd party email services:

• Mailster: A full-featured WordPress email newsletter plugin that lets you manage campaigns directly from your WordPress dashboard. You can connect it to third-party services like Mailgun or SendGrid to keep costs down as your list grows.
  • $79/yr with unlimited subscribers and sends
  • you will pay your third-party service for sending – see below
• Newsletter Plugin: A free option that offers premium add-ons. This plugin connects with services like Mailgun and SMTP servers, making it ideal for occasional senders with small budgets.
  • Compatible with every SMTP plugin
  • Free version is powerful

Part 2: A Service for sending bulk mail

Delivering emails at a large scale is a constant challenge for 4 main reasons:

• Volume and velocity: Massive amounts of emails need to be delivered quickly.
• Infrastructure: Global reach, dynamic networks, and especially spam filters.
• Security and compliance: Authentication and regulations.
• User experience: Deliverability, engagement, and scalability.

Services like AWS SES or Mailgun charge based on the number of emails you send, not the size of your list. This pricing model can be much more affordable for occasional senders than paying for subscribers you don’t actively email each month.

For example, AWS SES with a list of 1,000 subscribers, sending one or two emails per month would cost less than $1—far cheaper than most mainstream email marketing platforms.

• AWS SES: (Amazon Web Services Simple Email Service)
  • free: send or receive up to 3,000 messages each month (for a year after starting account)
  • Basic fees: $0.10/1000 emails.
  • So this is a great “pay-as-you-go option —but the AWS interface can be daunting.
• Mailchimp has a new pay-as-you-go but it is very expensive (and hard to find the place on the website that shows how much it actually costs):
  • 3 credits per email, 1 credit per SMS
  • Credits expire in 1 year
  • $200 for 5,000 credits (1,666 emails) (60x the price compared to AWS!!!)
  • $260 for 10,000 credits (3,333 emails)
  • $390 for 15,000 credits (5,000 emails)
  • $1,300 for 50,000 credits (16,666 emails)
  • If you purchase Pay As You Go credits while on the Forever Free Plan, you are immediately upgraded to a paid plan and any remaining Forever Free credits are not carried over
• Google Cloud: (not easy) sending mail from a GCE instance requires a non-GCE server through which you relay mail. SES or SendGrid or Mailgun.
• Mailgun was inexpensive via “Flex”: Mailgun’s Send flex plan was a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing model that allowed users to pay for each message they send, rather than committing to a subscription. Only $1 per thousand messages sent, with the first $1 charged for the 1,001st message sent in a month. update 2024: The Flex plan is no longer offered.
• Postmark (ActiveCampaign)
  • 100 emails per month for free
  • 10,000 emails for $15

There is another plugin that replaces the “send mail” function of all emails that WordPress sends: WP Mail SMTP: but this is not specific to sending newsletters.

All-in-one email list providers

If you don’t want to use a WordPress plugin with a separate email-sending service you can still get more than 500 contacts for free from these first 2 services:

1. Kit.com
   • 10,000 subscribers, unlimited emails
   • this is a very generous offering!
2. Zoho Campaigns
   • Free plan offers up to 2k contacts
3. MailChimp
   • Free includes up to 500 contacts, with 1,000 sends per month and a daily limit of 500
   • pay-as-you-go – is an option but pricing is not revealed
4. GoDaddy $22/mo
5. Mailpoet $11/mo
   • free up to 500
   • A WP plugin which is nice but not much cheaper?
6. Constant contact
   • 0-500 $12/mo

Substack

Another option to consider is Substack. They don’t have limits on subscribers even when you are not charging for your content. They are organized around charging for content however so there might be some confusion there. You can choose to offer some content for free while reserving premium content for paying subscribers.

Drawbacks: when signing up there is a 2nd step where you indicate if you want paid or free. Not sure if that step exists if it’s free only but I am guessing yes.
If you already have an account, There is a 3rd step of ‘recommendations’ for other substacks to follow. And a 4th and 5th step of “do you want to recommend this to your readers”.

Overall, it’s formatted a bit more like a blog vs a newsletter. But you could still format each entry with links back to your “real” blog/news posts.

Signup forms: Substack provides a form that can be embedded on a website using the iFrame Embed feature. But this doesn’t offer many customization options and isn’t ideal for custom landing pages. Some useful tools are available at: substackapi.com.

Conclusion

Artists and galleries with growing email lists shouldn’t have to pay high fees for email marketing, especially if they’re only sending emails occasionally. By using a WordPress plugin that integrates with third-party delivery services like AWS SES, you can manage your campaigns and save money as your audience grows.