COMMENTS
Another company we've had great success with is SwiftPage, http://www.swiftpage.com/
Thank you so much for your kind mention of our gal, Emma. She's blushing you know?
We really appreciate you including us in your post.
Cheers,
Dave Delaney
Useful blog. Haven't done campaign yet (mainly because worried about losing, not gaining, customers).
Here are a couple additional questions to ask:
What is your "block" rate? Some of these vendors that have been around for a while and are now blocked as corporate spam.
Do you provide alerts for opens and click throughs so I can view and react to results or do I have to go to a report and view static data? If you have an inside sales team it would be great if they could see and respond to opens and click throughs.
These are questions that popped into my head but if I may add a word of caution...many of clients rely heavily on email marketing. What we have seen happen is that people become so enamored of using the tool that they flagellate their prospects with emails. Not good...you become white noise in an overcrowded in box.
Lastly, I would like to add a vendor to the list. Please consider Eloqua - our clients give them rave reviews!
Hope this helps.
Helpful post - I did a little study on delivery rates for some of these email vendors. Basic conclusion - there is no statistically significant difference in delivery rates across several of the companies -
http://seanharper.net/2008/01/26/permission-email-deliverability-comparison/
One other thing to keep in mind, if you have a big-ish list and need pricing flexibility, some of these companies may be willing to work with you. I really like the company we use (icontact) but they didn't have a per-email pricing plan (we don't mail very often). It turns out that they actually do have a per-email plan, I just had to ask for it.
Another consideration - how will it integrate with your other data stores? If you have a shopping cart or a CRM system, you can end up wasting a lot of time keeping that list synchronized with the list hosted at your email marketing company if the right interfaces don't exist for automating the synchronization.
@Doug - I have not heard of them, but thanks for posting.
@Dave - Thanks for noticing. I really love how you guys embrace the brand and personify it. I mean her. :)
@ Sean - I love the data! Email me "mvolpe" at HubSpot if you want want to write a guest post on our blog using some of this or similar data or collaborate some other way.
@Trish - Thanks for mentioning Eloqua. You bring up a good point about larger/more complex systems. I didn't include them because I don't really see what they do as "email marketing". In fact, they would probably fail most of the tests in the questions in the article - it takes a long time to set the system up and it is quite expensive. They are solving a different probelm - "lead nurturing".
I am not saying it is a bad product. In fact, it is actually a decent product. It is just solving a much more complex problem. Other established systems like Eloqua that do email-based lead nurturing are Manticore and vTrends. They all cost a minimum of thousand$ per month. They are really aimed at much larger companies with more complex problems than what I was trying to talk about in this article, which was solving the problem of "how do I email my 200 customers or 5000 prospects once a month?" The lead nurturing systems solve the problem of "how do I send emails to move my 50,000 prospects along in my sales cycle using segmentation and targeting?"
As an example, with Constant Contact I can send an email to 5000 prospects in about 30 minutes for $50, and my IT guy won't even know I did it. I don't even think an Eloqua salesperson gets out of bed for $500, nevermind $50. A simple probelm requires a simple and cheap solution.
But, if I am trying to send an email to 50,000 prospects and automatically target them with personalized messages using data in my database, using Constant Contact would be like trying to travel to Mars with a bicycle. But Eloqua (and others like vTrends and Manticore) can do things like this, but it reuqires a lot of time and money to set up, and I need to talk to my friendly IT staff and get them to link it to my internal databases. A complex problem requires a more complex and more expensive solution.
I've recently used iContact and found their service to satisfy the above listed items. Price point was very affordable compared to others.
Eamon, I've gained customers (clients) from my email campaigns. Give it a shot.
Lastly, speaking of Eloqua and it's purpose, a tech savvy friend of mine uses
www.group-mail.com for his business and loves it ... both in price and functionality.
Thanks for the valuable information. For any problem to be solved in marketing we need a solution which will reduce our risk factor. We can get a good solution with Email marketing solution.
I have used Constant Contact (and still do). They do a really good job of covering all the bases... including bocked emails. What I like about them is that the email is coming from you, not Constant Contact. You tell the system what email to use (and you must verify it as a legitimate email) and you tell the system what to place in the "from" line. They have checks when you import email addressed to make sure you have them legitimately. And they are pretty easy to use (building the ads & managing you databse). Pricing is very flexible. We have been very happy with them & have had some pretty good success with the email marketing as a result.
Excelent blog... And very good things to consider when looking for an email marketing system. I wish I had this resource when I was put in charge of finding our email marketing system.
@Taryn - I agree! Constant Contact is a great and affordable basic solution for most companies.
Just thought I'd post a link to Jeanne Jenning's book The Email Marketing Kit over at SitePoint for people who are new to Email marketing. I used it when I first started and it has some great tips and techniques for maximizing your email campaigns.
http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/c6ac756/3/84
Also, what about
SendStudio NX as an email marketing solution? No monthly fees and you can send as many emails as you want!
My url got whacked in the above post... Here's the link again:
http://www.justdreamweaver.com/interspire-send-studio-nx.html
I started using
iContact about 6 months ago, and I'm now a pretty big fan. They have a great community feature which gives my newsletters exposure, and brings more readers to my site.
Interspire I can’t recommend at all while the software is good the company policies are deceiving and misleading.
They sold their SendStudio software including support and update plans (which in the past included all updates and upgrades) until the day they renamed the software to Email Marketer as part of a small update. Then they wanted all customers to pay again regardless whether they had active support plans or not . The support forum quickly filled with many very upset users so the threads where deleted and users banned.
Interspire is not to be trusted!!!!!
Interspire is operating very deceptive,
not disclosing ongoing costs like updates and upgrades and changing
it’s policies often and unannounced to the disadvantage of the customer.