Why not to mail 5000 people out of the blue

17 July 2016 16:00

Last Friday I blogged about a rather large increase in subscribers due to sponsoring a contest, and about my intentions to send them an e-mail stating hey everyone, I’m Jeroen, I sponsored a contest you participated in, these are my books, stay on this list if you want to hear when I write another.

Well, turns out I tripped all sorts of abuse monitors MailChimp has in place. The unsubscribe count was too high according to MailChimp, and about 1 in 10 unsubscribers were filing complaints.

This, obviously, is not a good thing, so I contacted them to explain what I had done and what they recommended to do. Their response: unsubscribe the entire batch you just added and manually (i.e. outside of MailChimp) ask them to resubscribe. A process they call reconfirming the list.

So that’s what I just did, or rather, what I’m in the process of doing. I unsubscribed all the added accounts (at least, the ones that were still left), and am currently sending them an e-mail telling them:

  • Why I e-mailed them
  • That they are now unsubscribed
  • That I won’t bother them again unless they resubscribe
  • That I apologize for the inconvenience I caused

I’m hoping this will be the end of this rather interesting experience