Email Marketing Provider Review – iContact

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been taking an in depth look at different email marketing providers and how they stack up to each other. Today we’re taking a look at the final of the major email providers: iContact. Be sure you look back at our reviews of Mail Chimp and Constant Contact as well.

In these reviews, we’re looking primarily at the following three areas:

1. Cost
2. Ease of Use (amount of technical knowledge required)
3. Function/features (e.g., Deliverability rates, social integration, templates, etc)

Cost – as low as FREE

On April 13, 2011, iContact rolled out the free edition. With this edition, accounts have the following:

• Up to 500 subscribers
• 2,000 sends (called messages)
• 24 templates you can choose from
• 5 mb image hosting
• Email & chat support

(more…)

Email Marketing Provider Review – Constant Contact

A week ago we posted about how important it is to use an email marketing provider. A few days after that we took a look at using Mail Chimp as an email marketing provider.

Today, we are going to look at using Constant Contact.

If you recall in our First post, there are three primary areas to consider when deciding your email provider:

1. Cost
2. Ease of Use (amount of technical knowledge required)
3. Function/features (e.g., Deliverability rates, social integration, templates, etc)

Cost – staring at $12.75 a month

Constant Contact doesn’t offer much in the area of pricing. Once your 60-day free trial has expired, you’ll end up paying somehwere between $15 to $150 a month. They do, however, offer a discount for users who pay 6 or 12 months in advance, which means you could pay as little as $12.75 a month.

(more…)

Email Marketing Provider Review – MailChimp

A couple days ago we posted about how important it is to use an email marketing provider. Today we’re going to start looking at some of the providers we’ve used and give you an idea of what that provider is like.

We’ll start with the provider we use here at Holistic Visibility and also recommend to the majority of our clients: MailChimp.

If you recall in our last post, there are three primary areas to consider when deciding your email provider:

1. Cost
2. Ease of Use (amount of technical knowledge required)
3. Function/features (e.g., Deliverability rates, social integration, templates, etc)

(more…)

Are You Still Using Outlook for Bulk Emails?

This week we’re dedicating our posts to discussing the art of email marketing. On Monday we discussed the idea of permission based email marketing and how to generate a quality distribution list. Today, let’s focus a little time on the technology required to effctively leverage email marketing.

Some small business owners I’ve spoken with want to use Outlook or their normal email client to distribute to their email list. Normally this desire is spawned by several factors including familiarity, cost, and seeming ease.

While these are strong in the minds of most Entrepreneurs, there are several reasons you should an email marketing service is really the best option.

1. Limits on sends. If you use Outlook and your normal email provider, you will run into limits of how many emails you can send at a time. Most email providers I’ve explored this with, including Comcast, Google email, Yahoo, etc.
2. CAN-SPAM Compliance. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 governs email marketing. There are several pieces to being CAN-SPAM compliant, and using an email marketing provider ensures you are without having to put much work into the effort.
3. Beautiful HTML Emails. While I’ve seen a lot of people try to send “designed” emails from Outlook, these are not always HTML compatible. The reason this is important is because not all email programs can render emails produced by Outlook. Using an email marketing provider ensures the recipient will be more likely to see the design you’ve created. Most also provide several templates you can use instead of having to design your own.
4. Effectiveness Statistics. Isn’t it nice to know if your marketing efforts have been effective? When you send marketing emails through an email marketing program you get a bunch of statistics to measure your effectiveness such as deliverability, open and click through rates…just to name a few. (more…)

The New Mind of Marketing

As we have worked with small business owners to develop marketing strategies, one of the marketing channels commonly desired is Email Marketing. While this can be a great marketing tool, it can also be an area that is easy to fail at, and entrepreneurs give up way too early. Why? Like other marketing efforts, people want to take the short cut.

List size matters…right?

Yes, list size does matter, but only if the list has the right people in it. What do I mean? When you look at building your list, there are two options you can explore: 1) purchase your list, or 2) organically build your list.

Purchased email lists: While purchased lists may work well for phone sales, they are increasingly ineffective for email marketing. Often a list with thousands of email addresses in it will have a 40-50% undeliverable rate. Of the 50-60% that does deliver, you’ll be lucky if you see a 1-2% open rate…and that’s if your subject line is really engaging. From that open rate you’ll be doing really well to see 0.5-1.0% conversion (taking the specified action). These numbers are on the first send, and every subsequent send gets less effective.

So let’s look at this in some hard numbers:

Purchased List:	3,500 addresses
Deliverable:	1,750-2,100 addresses
Opens	17-42 emails
Conversions	1

Using the “Stupid” Test

When I think through what things I’ll going to recommend to a client, I start with two questions. First, I ask the client if they would respond to the type of marketing effort being made. Second, I ask myself the same question. Why do I ask these questions?

Marketing is about engaging your audience, getting them to take action. Marketers often forget to do this “stupid” test, and start out on tasks that will not garner a good response because they make sense in theory. Theory must always be grounded in reality, what we know works based on personal experience or industry study.

The point here is if you wouldn’t respond, why would someone else? The first piece of response in email marketing is looking at the person from whom you’re receiving email and deciding if you’re even going to open the email. While the body of the email may be great, if you’re not getting it opened, it doesn’t matter.
(more…)