With all the advances and excitement over 'Web 2.0' these days, we've been inundated with emerging online avenues for marketing and communicating a message. From Flickr to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook to Delicious to Digg to Reddit and on, organizations are intelligently seeking and seizing new virtual opportunities to get the word out. Parallel to the explosion of social networking, or perhaps because of it, we've also witnessed and immense growth in choice in some of the more mature avenues, such as email marketing tools.
five or ten years ago if you wanted to have a rich email marketing platform, you were more limited to licensing proprietary software, paying someone to build it for you, or, building it yourself. Nowadays the model has changed, and there are several feature rich ways to send email campaigns that are attractive, effective, affordable, and trackable. The only trouble that remains, is deciding which one is right for you and your organization.
So you ask,
"I've got Outlook, and it's been sending email reliably throughout my address book for years - So now why would I want to choose and pay for eMarketing services?"
Well the answers, lie in the features that go beyond vanilla flavour black text on a white background, and a hope that your email hail mary doesn't end up in everyone's virtual dustbin. The following are some of the more important features that make using an online newsletter tool worth the costs, and are what you should consider when making a choice.
Features
Brandable & Customizable Templates
The first feature to mention is the creation of HTML email templates; which allow custom design, branding, images, and colour that spice up your everyday message. Adding a bit of brand, and structure to you content can go a long way into making your message emotive, attention grabbing, and "sticky" in the memory of your readers. To me this is the online difference between a black and white photocopy, and a professionally printed colour brochure. Keep in mind with serious customization, you should have comfort wading through HTML - although some tools have nice templates as a starting point. With people's inboxes already full, making something attractive and attention grabbing can be worth it.
Email Tracking & Reporting
How effective is your message? How many people read it? How many people don't? Another common feature is email tracking, letting you keep tabs on the effectiveness of your time spent crafting a message. Typically you can find out the percentage of people who read your message, deleted it, forwarded it, or what they've clicked on inside. Tracking can give you great insight into the overall reach of your message, the strength of its content, and insights into what your readers are interested in.
Subscriber Management
Quality tools will allow you to manage and segment your subscribers all in a central place. In addition, being able to grow your subscriber list with a website opt-in form is a feature some tools make painless. Unless you enjoy manually typing and collecting email addresses, this is definitely a feature to look out for.
Price
With the slickness of a car salesman, I've sold you all of the features before mentioning price. In reality, there are plenty of tools to choose from that are feature rich and affordable. The pricing models can be different, so do some shopping and find one that's suitable for you. Some charge a monthly fee, some on a per campaign/subscriber basis.
An Overview of some Tools
Of course the tool that you end up choosing, has a lot to do with the type of organization you are, the budget you have, and the technical savvy of your staff members. The following are some starting points for you to look at, the integrated tool being geared toward not for profit and advocacy groups.
Small to Medium Sized Business:
Campaign Monitor (www.campaignmonitor.com)
Mailbuild (www.mailbuild.com)
Emma (www.myemma.com)
Topica (www.topica.com)
Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com)
Breeze (www.feelbreeze.com)
YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com)
Integrated Tools - (support online donations, and constituency tools)
Lower end:
Democracy in Action (www.democracyinaction.org)
eTapestry (www.etapestry.com)
LocalVoice (www.localvoice.com)
Upper Tier:
GetActive (www.getactive.org)
Convio (www.convio.com)
Kintera (www.kintera.com)
Typically, Communicopia is a fan of Campaign Monitor if we had to give a nod one way or the other. In total admission we haven't tried them all or even most of them, but Campaign Monitor has served our clients well in the past.
This blog post was based on a webinar I attended with the Non-profit Technology Network, and the archived materials for it can be found at:
www.nten.org