Email Marketing Apps for Small Business

Email marketing is one of the dominant ways that a small business reaches out to customers and prospects. Email marketing is about relationships — and successful relationship marketing involves a lot more thought than simply firing off a newsletter via email.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, email marketing is one of two marketing budget items that saw an increase in 2009.  The other is social media.

But where many have claimed that “email is dead,” MarketingSherpa has proven otherwise in its studies.  In fact, they show that email is quite social.  A recent survey asked users how they share information they find on the internet:  78% responded that email is how they do it.  22% use social media sites.

Here are 30 small business email marketing applications to grow customer relationships and your business:

Emma

Emma is a Web-based service that combines do-it-yourself with free personal assistance when you need it (custom email design comes at an additional charge).  They have strong tracking and analytics components that allow you to learn what works, or doesn’t, with your audience.

Constant Contact

They offer a free 60-day trial. They have been around a long time and have a strong arsenal of email marketing tools from HTML newsletter templates to personal coaching on how to get your email campaigns done right.  They have added event management so you can handle online registration, as well as online survey tools to gather info from customers and prospects.

AWeber

AWeber grew very popular because it focused on auto-response emails.  They made it very simple and elegant to create a form a prospect would fill out.  This service is auto-responded to that information with whatever message you had set up. They offer a robust set of tools including email newsletters, emails to RSS, and, of course, auto responders.  First month is $1, and then pay-as-you-go based on subscriber count.  You don’t pay per email with them.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the first email marketing providers to offer a “forever free” plan.  Small business users I know love this plan as it gives you up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails for free each month.  After that, it has pay-as-you-go pricing.  On top of the email newsletter and database list management, they offer integration with online event registrations and ticket sales via Eventbrite.

iContact

iContact offers all of the same features as the others, but they focus attention on their deliverability rates – often talked about as whitelist agreements. While it may not seem like a big deal at first glance, if your email provider isn’t doing things right, your email may not get through.  iContact partners with a third party, Pivotal Veracity, to score emails to help improve how many get through to recipients. They offer a free trial, no credit card to get started, and a good educational resource section.

Vertical Response

In addition to email, Vertical Response is probably one of the more integrated services out there, with integration to Intuit and Salesforce.  They offer postal mail options, too, so you can send a postcard to a prospect or customer to add another touch beyond email and it has great educational materials also.

EmailBrain

I liked that they had a “no credit card” free trial signup.  More importantly, I really appreciated that they offer an industry-focus approach with 20+ industry examples and case studies.  You could dig in and see what someone else like you was doing — a good way to get a jumpstart on your email marketing.

eConnect

eConnect Email’s claim to fame is their the first provider to offer a tagging system for email.  Look at it as a meta-organizing system where you can see what your customers and prospects find interesting and are clicking on.  You can tag items in a specific email, in a campaign, and across multiple campaigns.  That information is then available on a subscriber level, so you can see the top five tags your customer is interested in.

FuseMail

FuseMail offers email hosting as well as campaign management.  They have a 14-day free trial.  The big area that stood out for me was they have an SMTP Direct service (which is an email gateway) where you can use your existing email newsletter program and gain the advantages of their email servers.  The advantage of this is that you don’t have to get everyone on your existing mail list to “opt-in” to your newsletter again, which is almost always a requirement when signing on with a new service.  FuseMail doesn’t have this requirement with their SMTP Direct service.

SimplyCast

SimplyCast, owned by Mailworkz (offers 300 emails a month “free forever” account, similar to MailChimp).  Some of the key features that SimplyCast offers are worth considering:   Image hosting (so you can easily have your image render properly), easy to include attachments, forward-to-a-friend options from within the email (great for viral stuff), and dozens of template categories.

JangoMail

Many providers tag your emails with “Powered by ABC Email…” and you probably don’t particularly want to see this sort of branding on your email messages to customers.  JangoMail promises “your emails are your emails, not ours.”  Even though they are a web-based email provider, they allow for you to manage your messaging through Outlook or Thunderbird, and other web-based apps like Gmail and Yahoo, too.  Free trial allows for 50 test emails.

GetResponse

GetResponse appears to be very social media savvy.  They offer video email and social media tools.  Your email subscribers, for example, can easily receive your Twitter updates via the GetResponse service.   They also have a split-testing feature so that you can test one email against another to see which one pulls better results.

Contact29

Contact29 is an email marketing provider focused primarily on the real estate and mortgage industries. If you are in those industries, they are worth a look.

SendLabs

SendLabs has created a tool to help you see what your email will look like in the recipient’s inbox.  With a single click, this feature within the SendLabs Summer ’09 release will send a copy of your email to all of the major email programs (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.) and provide a screen shot report on how well your email will render for everybody.

Campaigner

Campaigner offers a nifty workflow tool that allows you to determine when and what actions trigger an email to be sent to your customer or prospect.  It is similar to an auto responder (which sends an email when a customer fills in a form on a website usually), but a bit more advanced.  With their workflow tool, you can trigger a specific response based on what a customer does within the email.  If they click a certain link, for example, they might receive an email 1 hour later.  Free trial, of course.

EasyContact

I liked the very simple 3-step plan that EasyContact presents to first time visitors.  You get a clear sense that they have thought about how to make it as easy as possible.   They also offer a free forever plan and low-cost pay-as-you-go options.

Big Response

The other services may have similar offers, but Big Response has a couple of things worth mentioning:  First, they highlight that you can collect an unlimited number of subscribers – meaning you don’t pay to store contacts and only pay for emails sent.   You get unlimited phone and email support from their experts. 

Benchmark Email

Their competitor comparison chart reveals a lot about what they offer that others don’t.  You can tie into your Google Analytics account.  You can view all of your subscriber opens within a map within the reporting feature.  You can segment out all of your email lists easily which is handy as you get to know your customers better.

StreamSend

The big differentiator for StreamSend is they offer every customer a private IP address, which helps you keep your reputation intact.  You are not judged by the email provider you use, but by your email quality.

myNewsletterBuilder

myNewsletterBuilder stands out in the crowd of email marketers by providing pre-written content that you can use in your newsletters and emails, by industry segment.  They also partnered with eVoiceSpot, which is a multimedia rich presentation service that you can embed into your email or newsletter.

YesMail

YesMail has one major awards and recognition for its platform and service.  They have a specific small business offering called YesMail Direct.  This link goes direct to that page. They are connected to InfoUSA, so if you need to build a mailing list you can do it all under one roof.

Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi is a simple email marketing system.  One of the nice features is it comes with free design assistance.  It also has a limited edition that is completely free and includes good sharing functions like Forward to a Friend, among many other standard features.

PoMMo

PoMMo is a free open-source program that bills itself as “mass mailing” software.  It is a no-frills program.  It’s is 100% free.  However, like many open source apps, remember there’s always a cost — it costs you time.  You are pretty much on your own when it comes to installing it and troubleshooting issues.  There is no customer support to call.

CRM EMAIL

Many companies don’t like their email efforts separated from their customer data. Keeping it all together is a lot of work.  Customer relationship management software companies have listened, but these five web-based offerings are aimed at the small business owner.  If you want to enable customized emails to your customers, with full tracking and opportunities to create new campaigns from your customer data, then you should look closely at these companies:

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is a popular CRM solution with automated email marketing as a central concept.  As you make contact with customers via email, or via interactions on your website or online shopping cart, Infusionsoft tracks those contact points.  You can then use those interactions to send targeted and relevant communications. Your salespeople can access this info and understand what communications the customer has seen, or where they’ve gone on your site, and have a more intelligent conversation.  (Note:  Infusionsoft is a sponsor of this site’s Internet radio show.)

Zoho CRM

Zoho is an online application suite like OpenOffice or Google Documents, but with a lot more applications and options for managing your business.  Their ZohoCRM tool recently introduced the email within CRM option. The email add-on is $5 a month additional.

Highrise HQ

Highrise HQ is a web-based CRM from 37 Signals (owner of Basecamp, a popular project management tool).  Like most CRM solutions, they allow you to track who you talk to and so forth, but the ability to see all of your email efforts and dialogue with a customer on one page is fairly useful.

Leopard CRM

Integrating your email into your CRM efforts always looks daunting, but Leopard CRM simply says — calls our support team and we’ll walk you through it.

SalesBoom

SalesBoom is an online CRM application that offers an email campaign management tool.  With it, a user can capture leads via a simple web form and then send individual emails, or manage entire drip marketing campaigns where you email customers or prospects a series of emails over a period of time.

SalesJunction

SalesJunction offers one of the lowest monthly costs for a web-based CRM that I’ve found.  The basic edition has a 15 day trial.

Lyris HQ

Lyris HQ used to be known as Email Labs.  It integrates with Salesforce.com, which is the industry-leading online CRM solution, so that’s a plus for the many business owners using Salesforce.  I could not find pricing on their website, which is a downside in my opinion. Small business owners are too busy to talk to sales reps or sit through web demos just to discover pricing.

SOCIAL EMAIL

There’s loads of proof that social networks have changed how we communicate. They increase transparency, build trust, and give people (customers and prospects) the choice to opt-in to our messages.

With social media you can communicate directly to your customers without the traditional email hurdles and miss the inbox altogether.  For example, your company can send messages to people in a Facebook or LinkedIn Group today.  Twitter does not offer a group feature where you can message a group of people privately, but a third party app called Tweetworks does.  You could accomplish something similar by addressing a group with a hashtag although it wouldn’t remain private.  The goal with a private message is to avoid bothering others that would not be interested in the offer or message.

Return on Subscriber offers a solid post on how to achieve more social email:  Making your email marketing social

Finally, remember that programs and offer details change.  But, to the best of my knowledge all information herein is accurate as of the time of publication.

We hope these 30 applications and ideas help you.  What email marketing software do you use now?  Leave a comment below with your favorite.

Source: smallbiztrends.com

Email marketing – An Overview

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail (email). In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.

It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either cold lists or current customer database.

Broadly, the term is usually referred as:

• Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $1.51 billion on email marketing in 2011 and will grow to $2.468 billion by 2016.

Types of email marketing

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails:

Email newsletters

Email Newsletters are direct emails sent out on a regular basis to a list of subscribers, customers. The primary purpose of an email newsletter is to build upon the relationship of the company with their customers/subscribers.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, purchase or order confirmation emails and email receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to its high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are a golden opportunity to engage customers; to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns (such as customer referral programs).

Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they can also rent a list of email addresses from service companies.

Comparison to traditional mail

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using email marketing in comparison to traditional advertising mail.

Advantages

Email marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with email blasts that are delivered between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.
• Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.

Disadvantages

A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.

Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Opt-in email advertising

Opt-in email advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of email marketing.

Opt-in email marketing may evolve into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between the sender and receiver.  This system is intended to eventually result in a high degree of satisfaction between consumers and marketers. If opt-in email advertising is used, the material that is emailed to consumers will be "anticipated". It is assumed that the consumer wants to receive it, which makes it unlike unsolicited advertisements sent to the consumer. Ideally, opt-in email advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.

A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products.  In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically—known as Drip Marketing. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Six Hurdles to Bloggers

When Choosing the Blogging Applications….

Choosing the blogging applications can be confusing because on the surface, the various blogging software products such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and more are quite similar.

Following are six questions to ask yourself before you select your blogging applications to help you make the best choice to be a successful blogger.

1. What Are Your Goals for Your Blog?

Do you want to blog for fun or are you trying to make money or build a popular, highly-trafficked blog? The blogging application you choose is largely dependent upon your goals for your blog. Ask yourself the following questions to determine your goals for your blog:

• How much space will you need to store your blog's images and content?
• Do you want to display ads on your blog?
• Do you want to add forums and other features to your blog?

2. Do You Need to Significantly Customize Your Blog's Design?

Blogging application varies in terms of its ability to allow bloggers to customize the appearance and layout of their blogs with logos, specific fonts, designs and more. It's important that you determine the amount of customization you want and need for your blog before you select your blogging application.

3. Are You or Is Someone You Know Technical?

Different blogging application platforms require varying amounts of technical skill and knowledge. While there are blogging application options that even the most technically-challenged people can navigate and use successfully, many of the blogging application packages that provide advanced customization and features require at least some technical ability.

4. Will Your Blog Have Multiple Authors?

Some blogging application platforms are easier to configure with multiple authors than others. Determine your author needs before you choose your blogging application.

5. Do You Need Custom Email Addresses Tied to Your Blog's Domain Name?

If you want to have email addresses customized to match your blog's domain name than your blogging application options are more limited. Even if this is something you may not need in the short term, it's important to think about it now before you choose your blogging application.

6. Do You Have Money to Spend Each Month on Blogging application and a Blog Host?

Your budget will have a significant impact on the blogging application you choose. While there are many free blogging application platforms available online, those free blogging programs typically offer limited features. Although those limited features are usually adequate for the average blogger, they may not be enough for your blog depending on your long term goals for it.

Source:  weblogs.about.com