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How do I create an email newsletter?
My small business has been sending out monthly newsletters through our gmail account, but I need a way to create better looking newsletters. I'm looking for a cheap system that also has some related templates built into it. Any ideas?
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9 Answers
Roy -
There are a large number of Email Service Providers and Platforms that can help you execute and deploy email newsletters. A couple things and questions to consider before choosing a provider include:
1. Content: Are you manually creating content for your weekly newsletter or do you need integration with a Content Management System?
2. Design: Do you have creative design resources or are you looking for templates? I think you answered that above but remember finding a "cheap" provider may be short sighted. The quality of design and coding of the email html is crucial to success of your campaigns on multiple levels.
3. Resources/Support: Who is going to build and deploy these emails? Do they have experience with systems or will they need training or support?
4. Scalability: How big is your subscriber base and what is your expected growth rate? How does this growth translate into monthly sending volume? What other types of email communication could you use an ESP for, like transactional or promotional emails?
5. Deliverability: Every firm sending e-mail newsletters and marketing messages wants to make them more deliverable. It’s not enough to outsource your e-mail deployment to a professional, you also need access to the right tools to make sure those messages are making it past all the barriers—tools that ESPs may or may not provide.
6. List Management: What are the providers bounce management policies and capabilities? How do you plan to manage your Unsubscribe suppression list so you are CAN-SPAM compliant? Can you envision a time where you will have multiple customer mailing lists and/or customer segments?
7. Budget: Whats your willingness to invest in email as a media channel? Like I mentioned earlier, finding a "cheap" provider is shortsighted and you really need to think about email as an 'investment" in your business.
Once you have answers to these types of questions, you are really ready to investigate and compare providers. All the providers listed by colleagues above come highly regarded. Here are a couple of other resources that can be of help:
www.marketingprofs.com/bg/
www.whichesp.com/browseall
www.emailexperience.org/
www.email-marketing-reports.com/services.htm
I wish you the best of luck with your search and hope this was helpful. Once you decide on a ESP, it would be great to have you come back to the question and let us know who you went with and why you chose them.
/h/
There quite a few options available but after exploring many of them, I strongly recommend MailChimp. MC has great templates to start you off, lots of customizing options, social interfaces, analytics, list segmenting and testing, and much more. It is more than cost-effective for the quality it provides. Others you may want to explore:
MailChimp
InfusionSoft
Constant Contact
iContact
YesMail
We love Constant Contact. I've been using it for almost seven years now in a higher education setting.
Lots of options for sending periodic email newsletters. But I would highly encourage you to consider nurturing versus just email marketing to convert a one off email into a conversation. So basically when you send a newsletter out, if a prospect clicks on a case study, a nurturing app will allow you to automatically send a related "white paper" email that will engage the prospect further. If a prospect clicks a pricing link and goes to your pricing page then you can trigger an email to explain the pricing better and ask for a time for a phone consultation. Along these lines, there's a lot more you can do with nurturing / automation apps.
Having said that here are the ones I'd recommend:
- MadMimi (http://www.madmimi.com) - very very easy
- MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com) - very powerful
- ConstantContact (http://www.constantcontact.com) - the most establish
- Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com - this is our product) - simple yet powerful nurturing & automation
Hope this helps.
Best,
Vaibhav Domkundwar
Founder & CEO
408.223.1075
Nurture: http://www.nurturehq.com
ReadyContacts: http://www.readycontacts.com
Emailified: http://www.emailifiedhq.com
DataDoctor: http://www.datadoctorhq.com
You can also check out Campaign Monitor - no affiliation other than a happy customer.
There are many players but the main ones are Vertical Response, Constant Contact, MailChimp and iContact. Most have a free trial so I'd recommend testing the one that seems most intuitive meets your needs.
/mm/
I'm clearly biased as I work for an Email Service Provider, but the answer depends on your needs (see Howie's reply). If price is an issue, consider some of the entry level providers the others have mentioned (see Marco's reply). For the most part, the higher the price, the more individualized support you will receive (think: Dedicated Client Service Manager).
Best of luck!
DJ Waldow
Director of Community, Blue Sky Factory
@djwaldow
Key Points I was focused on was: ease of use, % of deliverability, and price.
I did research on a lot of them and chose Constant Contact, as I remember years ago that was the most used, and it still is today by many. I just started using it about a few months ago.
However I have not been all that impressed with it. I didn't find it so 'easy to use' and another sticking point is that you can't access the backside via Chrome. They don't tell you that until you sign up (pay money) and go to set everything up and there is the little message in small print above the blank screen - which I think is wrong in notifying you so late into it. So anytime I want to do something in CC I have to close out Chrome and open up Firefox. Not a big deal - but it's a hassle not worth dealing with - so I have been considering switching.
I was not aware of mailchimp, so thanks to all who informed of it! I will look into that. Hope this feedback on one of them was helpful. Let us know what you choose!
This is an update- about 3 hours since last posted:
Mailchimp ROCKS! Wish I knew of this before I joined Constant Contact.
THIS is unbelievable easy, user-friendly and with way more features than Constant Contact! Their tutorials are witty as are their emails as well :) The overall experience is a 100% difference for me and this is just the first few hours of reviewing their program and implementation.
I have spent the last few hours setting up things on MailChimp and switching off of Constant Contact. Thank you all again who suggested this.
Roy, you can try it for free too. Up to 1000 subscribers and 6000 emails. The cost after that is competitive to all the others, including CC.
Let us know though!
Jaxi :)
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