Email Marketing Services
What Do You Look for in an Email Marketing Service?
- Affordable and easy to use email campaign creation services that decrease setup time
- Email contact list demographic segmentation to enable focused marketing strategies to increase your success rates
- Reporting features that help judge how successful your campaigns are, and offer suggestions for improvement
- Effective customer online and offline support, preferably 24/7
| Service | Constant Contact | iContact | Vertical Response | Benchmark Email | Aweber |
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| Quick Overview | Best Deal | Popular Plan | Great Feature Set | Excellent Interface | For Affiliates |
| Plan Reviewed | Standard Plan | Plan 1000 | Monthly Plan | Plan 2.5k | Basic Plan |
| Max Subscribers | 2,500 | 1,000 | 2,000 | Unlimited | 500 |
| Emails / Month | Unlimited | 6,000 | Unlimited | 2,500 | Unlimited |
| Customer Support | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 |
| Our Review |
Includes excellent templates, HTML editing, and a comprehensive feature set. Offers a solid help desk and community. Full Review |
Offers a powerful email marketing service for individuals and businesses. Easy campaign setup and improvement tools. Full Review |
Includes a user-friendly control platform as well as HTML and template support. Good campaign reporting tools. Full Review |
Cheap prices for low volume email senders. Allows for video emails, surveys, and tracking tools for improvement.
Full Review |
Most popular among affiliate marketers. Allows for link tracking, sales conversions, click-through, and other features. Full Review |
| Free Trial |
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| Free Trial Limitations | Unlimited emails to 100 contacts (60 days) | 500 emails to 250 subscribers (30 days) | 100 emails | 250 emails (30 days) | 30 days |
| Price |
$30/mo
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$19/mo
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$28/mo
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$19.95/mo
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$19/mo
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What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing offers a number of benefits to online businesses and provides a cheap and effective way for vendors to increase their sales conversions, up-sell and cross-sell products and services and generally boost profits. Email marketing services can also provide you with an easy way to source valuable feedback from both your customers and general visitors to your website and is a useful tool for increasing your brand name exposure. Email marketing is basic a way of sending out information about your website electronically, and it is a legal requirement for your contacts to have ‘opted in’ to your email correspondence, otherwise this will be classed as spam mail. Contacts can opt in by signing up for a newsletter, or providing their email address voluntarily when checking out and paying for goods, and every time you send an email you should provide an ‘opt out’ section as well, just in case they have changed their minds and no longer wish to be contacted by you. Email marketing is a useful way of getting your message across to your customers and can take many formats and, and you can use newsletters, customer surveys, coupons, discount codes and new product line alerts to keep your brand name fresh in the minds of your customers, and encourage them to visit your website again in the future.
The Main Benefits of Email Marketing Services
Online research has shown that the majority of online shoppers visit a website at least seven times before they decide to buy anything, so it is essential that you have some way of following up website visits to ensure that potential customers return to you to complete a purchase rather than going through one of your competitors. Research has also shown and that the highest percentage of profits on most eCommerce websites is through repeat sales, so once your customers have purchased goods or services make sure you follow these up as well and stay in contact, as it is much time and cost effective to sell products to existing customers then it is to try and bring in new customers. The effectiveness of email marketing has been proven time and time again by online market research and it is widely used by big businesses all around the world to boost both online and offline sales such as Amazon, Microsoft, Wallmart, Sony, eBay and many more. Here are just 5 of the main benefits of online marketing:
1. Global Contacts – emails are one of the most cost effective ways of targeting global contacts, so no matter where your customers and members are you can reach them at just the click of a button, providing them with information about your website and following up on sales.
2. Time and Cost Effective – is costs almost 80% less to set up and manage an email marketing campaign as it does to run the equivalent direct mail, paper based campaign, and it is also much quicker and less time intensive than direct mail or print advertising when it comes to designing and executing a professional looking marketing campaign. You can also schedule email campaigns to be sent out at specific times, so even when you are away from the office you can still run your marketing strategies round the clock.
3. Interactive – unlike paper based advertising, email campaigns offer the opportunity to add interactive features such as music, graphics, videos, links and even mini games, and this all helps you to develop innovative, interesting marketing strategies that can grab the attention of your contacts and encourage them to visit your website again in the future.
4. Personalization – it is quick and very easy to personalize each and every email with the tools provided by email marketing services, and this means you can build and strengthen your customer relationships and help to create a solid, loyal base to support your business into the future.
5. Results – email marketing services make it easy for you to collect meaningful results from your campaigns, which you can compare side by side so that you can work on developing and improving your strategies for future send outs.
Key Features of Email Marketing
Email marketing services provide you with a straightforward way to keep in regular contact with all of your customers and website members through bulk emailing, and this allows you to set up very effective online marketing campaigns that can boost your sales revenues. Email marketing services provide you with all the tools you need to manage your email marketing campaigns including:
• Spam check tools – many email marketing services will provide you with spam check features, which will allow you to test your email campaign before you send it out, so that you can make sure your emails will not be considered as junk mail by the recipient’s inbox security filters and sent straight to the junk bin. This will save you a lot of wasted time and effort, as it will allow you to make amendments to your emails before you send them out to make them more acceptable to spam filters, so is an important tool for the overall success of your email marketing campaigns.
• Reporting Features – it is very important you understand how successful your email campaign has been, so you will know the areas that need improving in the future, and email marketing services can provide you with a number of reporting features which can tell you a range of information from how many people read your email through to how many clicked on the links provided. Some email marketing services are also compatible with Google Analytics, and this can provide you with even more useful data on your email campaigns.
• Autoresponders – email marketing services provide autoresponder services, which make it straightforward for you to schedule bulk email send outs, even if you are not in the office. This means you can quickly and easily keep in touch with all of your contacts, whether you have a list of 200 or 200,000 email addresses, and is an affordable way of contacting customers and members overseas.
• Customer Surveys – it is important you offer your customers with a way to tell you how they view your products and services, as this will provide you with valuable information on the areas where you are doing well, and also those that may need improving. This information will also help you to understand if you are targeting the right markets and pricing your products and services effectively.
• Group Filters – if you have large email contact lists then your email marketing campaigns may benefit from being more focused, so that you only send out messages to those customers that would most likely be interested in reading them. For this reason most email marketing services provide you with list filters, which allow you to quickly and easily section your list into particular groups by fields such as age, location, interests etc.
Email Marketing Tips
Setting up online marketing campaigns can be easy if you choose the right email marketing services, and this can help you to follow up sales, generate new customers and boost your annual profits and here are just a few tips to help you improve your campaigns into the future:
• Recommend A Friend – referrals can save you a lot of hard work when it comes to generating new customers and building up relationships, so when you send out your newsletters you could add in a ‘forward to my friend’ option, or include incentives such as money off coupons and cash back if your recipients get their friends to visit your website and sign up for your services.
• Set Schedule Dates – it is important that you do not send out too many emails to your contacts, as this can be annoying and they will end up deleting your emails before they even read them. Set up a weekly or monthly schedule instead and stick to it, and try to only send out emails when you have something to say, such as notifications of new products or services in your catalogue or upcoming sales and discounts at your online store.
• Subject Line – this is an important part of the email as generic subject lines can trigger spam mail filters, and also this will be the first part of the message that your recipients will read. Make sure the subject is catchy and lets the reader know a little about the email, so if you are sending out notifications of a sale on your website then you can put something like ‘Huge Bargains online now at YourStore’ or ‘Save up to 50% off in the Winter Sale’.
• Templates – email marketing services provide you with a number of pre-built templates to set up your campaigns, and this is important as it will give your emails a more professional look that will strengthen the message you are trying to send. Contacts will not be impressed if you send them a basic, text only email, so make sure you take advantage of the design tools offered by your email marketing service and add images, hyperlinks, contact details and even audio and video if it is available to make your emails look as interesting and original as possible.