sunriseIs Today The Day?

The day is going to come, and it may be here already, when you discover that you need help with your email marketing campaign. Sending emails one at a time from your desktop computer just isn’t working for you any longer.

You have a few dozen or maybe a few hundred customers in your contact list, but you know you can grow that list quickly with some help. Using one of the on-line email marketing services seems to be a good solution. You know that most of the professional Internet marketers use an on-line permission based email marketing service, and maybe you should too.

Some of the more well-know companies that provide this service include: Aweber, Constant Contact, iContact, GetResponse, InfusionSoft and 1 Shopping Cart. There are literally hundreds of companies that offer this service, each with they’re own set of features and pricing, which can make selecting the best service provider a challenging task.

In this article we’re going to evaluate the benefits of hiring an on-line permission based email-marketing company to help you build and maintain your list.

Email List Maintenance

Let’s start with list maintenance. When you hire an email marketing service, they take care of all of the technical issues. They have technicians on staff who have a vested interest in seeing that your email marketing campaigns run without a hitch. If there’s a problem with the software or equipment, they have someone on-call 24/7 to take care of it immediately. For many email marketers, this piece of mind is priceless.tools

Initial Cost Savings

There are no up-front costs. You won’t have to invest hundreds of dollars in software and hundreds more to install it on a dedicated server. Nor will you be responsible for installing software updates or having to worry about creating a security threat on your server.

If you choose to use an email marketing service to maintain your email list, they’ll charge you as little as $15 – $20 per month for a list of up to 500 names. And, depending on your business, you may never have more than 500 people on your list. If you do, these services will easily scale up to meet your needs at a reasonable price.

But before you decide on which service you want to use, it’s important to check with them to see if their monthly fee is based on the size of your list or the number of emails you send each month. So, if you think email marketing is going to play an important role in your marketing mix, I suggest you invest in a service that charges a fee based on the size of your list rather then the number or emails you send. They’re generally a much better value.

learningTraining Tools

The other thing I really like about most of email marketing services are the training tools they offer. In order to insure that you have a good experience with their service, they go out of their way to create a variety of tools to show you how to use their system. Some have training videos while others offer on-line help and free webinars. This is a huge benefit and one you really can’t appreciate fully until the time comes to use their software.

Feature Rich

Look for a service that provides all the bells and whistles. The companies I listed above offer some really cool features that will help you supercharge your email marketing campaign. Look for things like:

  • Ability to import your current mailing list
  • Ability to send auto-responders
  • Ability to send newsletters
  • Remove unsubscribed contacts
  • Ability to group your emails contacts
  • Automatically detect duplicate emails
  • Add additional information fields in the sign-up box
  • Required opt-in
  • Ability to add and host images
  • Ability to add hyperlinks
  • Create plain text messages
  • Create HTML messages
  • Availability of templates
  • See your email in WYSIWYG format
  • View HTML source code
  • Add email footer
  • Create web forms
  • Email scheduling
  • SPAM test
  • Email test
  • Click-through tracking
  • Conversion tracking
  • Sent emails
  • Delivered/Undelivered emails
  • Bounced emails
  • Opened emails
  • Forwarded emails
  • View unsubscribed contacts
  • Integration with Google Analytics
  • Email support
  • Phone support
  • Free trial
  • On-line community
  • High customer reviews

In Conclusion

Using and on-line permission based email marketing company could be just the thing you’re looking for to build your business and stay in touch with your customers. The cost of using one of these services along with the piece of mind that someone else is going to take responsibility for maintaining your list is priceless.

The thing to keep in mind is that once you begin to use a service, it will be very difficult to change in mid-stream. With a little research, you almost can’t go wrong using any of these services.

I would suggest you look hard at the service offered by Aweber. This is the service used by the majority of professional email marketers, and they’re using it because it works.

Before you invest hire one of these companies to run your email marketing campain for you, let me encourage you to read  part 2 of this article entitled: Permission Based Email Service: What Are The Disadvantages?