Email Marketing Advice

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Permalink Reply by Alex Goodall on March 7, 2009 at 6:17pm

Hello Mark

You somehow sweet-talked me into giving free marketing advice - so here it is.

I've used both a third-party hosted service and hosted my own script.

For maximum flexibility and lowest cost, host your own script. One of the best is Autoresponse Plus (the one I used).

But if you start to create a big list, then delivery rates become of paramount importance. Different ISPs start banning your domain because recipients are trigger-happy classifying your email as spam because they forgot they registered with you. Then you'll need to spend effort getting un-banned.

The best solution then is to use a third-party service that takes care of that, and the most widely-used in the internet marketing world is almost certainly Aweber. Reputedly, they have the highest delivery rates of any service.

The different ways you can apply e-mail marketing include:

- providing a seven part or 10 part etc course on a topic of interest to your subscribers
- sending a weekly or monthly newsletter
- sending ad hoc information and/or promotions

There are two important points to note in e-mail marketing:

1. Ensure you send information out reasonably regularly "train" your subscribers to expect e-mails from you
2. Make sure you include valuable information in what you send out and don't always be promoting either your products or someone else's. The optimum ratio of information e-mails to promotional e-mails is very dependent on your market and how you obtained the subscriber's name is in the first place

I hope that helps and if you want to purchase either all of the above products do get in touch with me beforehand.

Regards

Alex

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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on March 10, 2009 at 5:47pm

Alex Goodall said:

Hello Mark

You somehow sweet-talked me into giving free marketing advice - so here it is.

Don't you have to give me another 9 pieces of free advice before I have to pay for something or does this work differently to email marketing?

I've used both a third-party hosted service and hosted my own script.

For maximum flexibility and lowest cost, host your own script. One of the best is Autoresponse Plus (the one I used).

But if you start to create a big list, then delivery rates become of paramount importance. Different ISPs start banning your domain because recipients are trigger-happy classifying your email as spam because they forgot they registered with you. Then you'll need to spend effort getting un-banned.

The best solution then is to use a third-party service that takes care of that, and the most widely-used in the internet marketing world is almost certainly Aweber. Reputedly, they have the highest delivery rates of any service.

The different ways you can apply e-mail marketing include:

- providing a seven part or 10 part etc course on a topic of interest to your subscribers
- sending a weekly or monthly newsletter
- sending ad hoc information and/or promotions

There are two important points to note in e-mail marketing:

1. Ensure you send information out reasonably regularly "train" your subscribers to expect e-mails from you
2. Make sure you include valuable information in what you send out and don't always be promoting either your products or someone else's. The optimum ratio of information e-mails to promotional e-mails is very dependent on your market and how you obtained the subscriber's name is in the first place

I hope that helps and if you want to purchase either all of the above products do get in touch with me beforehand.

Regards

Alex

Lots of good ideas here. I've also heard good things about Mailchimp - any comments on that? We're probably heading for a hosted solution.

Mark

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Permalink Reply by José María on March 16, 2009 at 1:26pm

Hello Mark:

I think that using a good ESP is the best way to go when you are starting your email marketing program. My company is developing an email marketing application that, among some other features, will have Salesforce integration. It will be ready in a couple of moths. You can follow the process and find some good advice in our blog. I hope you try it out and tell us what do you think.

In the meantime, eventhough is my competition, you should try Mailchimp, Aweber and Campaignmonitor. The three of them are awesome.

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Permalink Reply by Rachel Clements on March 17, 2009 at 9:15am

Hi Mark,

A good forum topic! I started using campaignmonitor about a year ago and have not looked back since. Their web UI makes it incredibly easy to set up and integrate into your web site. Then it's very easy to send out emails in both HTML and text and the reporting features are excellent too. It handles all the subscribe/unsubscribe lists for you and you can create as many lists and projects as you like.

They are continually adding new features and making improvments and it's incredibly cost-effective. As a result of signing up, we have sent out way more campaigns in the last year than before. It makes light work of it.

We use it for most forms on our web site, such as when the user downloads our trial software and we email a link to them, for acknowledging subscription to our newsletter, sending out the newsletter and also sending out mini-campaigns.

I highly recommend them!

Rachel :-)

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Permalink Reply by Perry Ismangil on March 18, 2009 at 2:42pm

Mark,

I've recently started using sendloop.com. Nice Google Analytics integration, literally free for me as I have low volumes.

No direct integration to my hosted CRM (Heap), but easy enough to export/import from Heap to sendloop.

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