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While you’re building your list, you’ll want to research and choose an email marketing service. There are several available to email marketers, each with its pluses and minuses.
Why not just send your emails out with your email app like Outloook, Entourage, Mac Mail or Thunderbird? Well, there are several reasons. First, if you have a decent size list, or even a small one for that matter, your hosting company may think you’re a spammer and block you. Sure, that can be worked out easy enough, but why go through the headache in the first place?
There are a lot of reasons to use a service including, targeting, reporting and scheduling emails for later delivery. The main reason for using an email service is that they offer many of these useful features for a pretty small outlay of moolah. Typical services provide:
- Generate sign up form code to add to your website
- Opt-in/out management
- Autoresponders
- Easy to use templates (no coding necessary)
- Email preview
- Imports contacts from CSV, TXT, manual entry, cut & paste
- Contacts management
- Contact list segmentation (multiple lists for this and that)
- Automatic removal of unsubscribes & opt-outs
- Email campaign statistics – Sent, Bounces, Spam Reports, Opt-outs, Opens, Clicks & Forwards
- Export reports
- Phone, live chat & email support
- FAQ & help sections
In addition, most, if not all, support using your own code for custom emails branded to your website and marketing materials. I do this for many of my clients. It aids in maintaining consistent branding, while separating them from their competition.
What can you expect to pay for all these features? First, it’s important to know how they bill customers. Some charge by the email, while others charge by the number of contacts. The top rated services will put you back anywhere from $9.95 US to $15.00 US per month. Not too shabby. Plus, most offer a free trial.
Some of the consistently top rated online services are:
iContact
Benchmark
Constant Contact
Emma
Pinpointe
Mad Mimi
Bronto
VerticalResponse
MailChimp
Here’s a link to a list of reviews on Email Marketing Options.com.
Here’s a link to an email service user survey.
So, this brings us to the topic of this post – How to choose an email marketing service that’s right for you. Given that most of the top services provide similar feature sets, a lot boils down to billing. Do you plan to send several emails each month or will it only be one or two? Do you anticipate a large list or will it mostly be a few hundred at best?
If you’re planning to send out an email each week or more, you’ll want to go with a service that bills by the number of contacts, rather than the number of emails. Conversely, if you plan to have several thousand contacts and sending only email per month, odds are, you’ll want a service that charges by the number of messages sent each month.
Beyond this is the user interface. Are you comfortable with it? Is getting around easy? Use the trial period to test things out. Is it easy for you to create a message? Also, be sure to tap into customer support and peruse the Help section during this time. Is Support responsive? Does the service offer good help articles?
Finally, ask colleagues who use these services for their opinions. Also ask about them on various online discussion groups and forums.
Next up: Creating your first email
