People have always wanted to stay updated on things they are interested in. In the past, some of this was done was in newspapers (be it articles or advertising) or sending out newsletters by mail. Today this same practice is done by many methods, be it social networking, websites or email. Most methods can integrate an eNewsletter, which can allow you to communicate various aspects of your enterprise over any or all of these current communication tools. You want to send something that looks professional and appealing to your clients and you want to do it quickly so that you're not spending a lot of your time creating and sending newsletters. There are a lot of services out there to help you effectively market yourself and keep your clients in touch with your enterprises' activities. We are going to take a look over a few of the options out there.
These services are in competition with one another which means they all have similar feature sets. All of the services we're looking at today have several common features. They all allow integration with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, meaning that anyone that follows you can receive links to your newsletter and also subscribe to your mailing list directly through Facebook. These services will also track various statistics like how many received the newsletter, the number of people who have looked at your emails, email addresses that aren't working and how many people clicked links in the email. They If an email can't be delivered or people unsubscribe, they are taken off your email list automatically which reduces wasted emails.
Getting caught in spam filters can be a major pain. Not only do your clients not see your newsletter, which means that send was wasted, but if a mail server flags your emails as spam, no one will end up getting them. All of the sites boast tools (not all are free but they are all included in certain pay plans) that will help to make your email the best it can be and avoid spam filters. Most of them will allow you to compare multiple versions of your newsletter to find the most effective version so you get the best results.
Setting up your newsletters is easy on all of the sites. They all have preset templates or you can easily create your own and save them so you don't have to create a page every time. The template selection and ease of use will vary depending on the service you're using but they all have something that works. How well they work for you will mainly be based on your personal preferences. You are also able to preview what your newsletters will look like in various browsers in most of the paid versions of the services. This is important since some things will look different depending on what program is used to open them. Finally, they all have some sort of mobile application with a variety of uses so that you can use these programs from just about anywhere.
Let's start taking a look at some of the services that are available. The first one we'll look at is Constant Contact. This service has full features, including mobile apps and social software integration. It has a free 60 day trial period where you can get in and see what this service has to offer with the ability to add up to 100 addresses. Once the trial is up, you can continue with monthly packages starting as low as $10.50.
The next one to mention is MailChimp. MailChimp is a very popular service that's used by a lot of companies. It has a full feature set for the paid versions which start at $10/month (with a 15% non-profit discount) but one of the best features of MailChimp for smaller enterprises is its free versions. MailChimp allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails per month. If you have, for example, 500 people that you want to receive your email and you only send three emails to each person per month this free program is exactly what you need. While you don't get all of the features you would with a paid account, you aren't missing anything you need to create beautiful, effective newsletters and if budget is your concern, you can't ask for better than a good service that's free.
Vertical Response is another service that has a free service but this service is only for non-profits. They give you 10,000 free emails every month under their pay as you go system. If you need to send more than 10,000 emails per month, they offer 15% discount on purchased credits. With a full suite of features, this is a great option, particularly for those that would send less than the 10,000 emails each month. They also offer printed post-cards, coupon generation and other useful resources which they discount by the same 15% for non-profits.
And finally we took a look at Campaign Monitor. One item that we haven't discussed to this point is branding or badges that some of these services will enclose in the sent emails. These are small icons or text that end up on your newsletter showing the service you used to create it. Many of them, like MailChimp, will allow you to take this off with their paid version but force you to have the branding with free accounts. Campaign Monitor doesn't do any branding so there isn't anything to turn off, which can be nice but is something that you can do as an option with most of the other services. Their basic plan starts as low as $9 per month for 2,500 emails to up to 500 people per month.
Whether you go with a paid program or one of the free accounts available, these services can help you to take your newsletters that extra step to create a more attractive, better circulated package. The various user interfaces that are designed to help make your email pop vary and will depend on your preferences as to which one you prefer. Give the various services a shot and see how they handle your next eNewsletter.
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