Once you've master the art of personal correspondence it's time to move on to something a little bit more efficient. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will only let you send email to 20-50 people at a time. While this might be okay for planning a family reunion, it's not, as the big kids say, "scalable." If your distribution list has grown larger than a few dozen people, it's time to look at a bulk mailing system.
Most Web site hosting providers will also offer some kind of open source mailing system that allows you to send out bulk emails. It is typically Mailman or PHPList. I've used both and I think they're both good. But they're limited to what they can do.
Mailman is fantastic for sending email that looks like email. You literally prepare an email, send it to a special address, and the email is processed by mailman and sent to everyone on your distribution list. PHPList, on the other hand, is Web-based. You sign into a Web site and then write what seems like a Web page and then click send to have the Web site send an email to everyone on your distribution list.
If you're happy with plain emails and you know your distribution list is unlikely to grow more than a few hundred (or even a few thousand), these options are great. The Ginger Press uses mailman for their newsletter. Every issue is a wonderful, chatty message to its readers. It's not big on hype or The Sell or being slick or clever. It's just a really great newsletter from the owner of the bookshop to the inboxes of its customers.
Unfortunately the open source software packages don't offer as much polish as their commercial counterparts. It's as though the projects have been abandoned back in the days of the Web 1.0 (pre-Facebook). Commercial services now offer sophisticated tracking options to tell you how many people have opened your newsletter. They also offer elegant HTML templates that allow you to design your newsletter to look like a Web page.
Some of the well respected services include Constant Contact, Aweber and Emma (no affiliation). Within the Drupal community there's also been a lot of positive chatter about MailChimp, a relatively new player to the mass mailing game. And there are other systems too. A Web search for, "marketing email service" will find you even more services to compare.
Before making your final decision on which mailing system to use, be sure to ask a few questions:
- How much will it cost me to send out an email to my list? Are there pricing options that are more appropriate for my marketing plan? For example: some charge based on the number of emails sent; and others charge a flat fee for the month (within a given number of subscribers).
- Do they offer templates that suit your business, or will you need to pay a graphic designer to create a template for you?
- Does the administration area allow you to track statistics about each email you send out?
- Can you easily import AND export your contacts, or are you stuck with that system with no way of retrieving your contact database?
- Will the system integrate easily with your Web site? Will it be easy to add a customized, "sign up here" box to your Web site?
You may even want to ask a few of these questions to the company you're thinking about using to see how they treat you.
There's only one type of email left from The lingo of email marketing: auto responders. I'll talk about this marketing tool in an upcoming blog post. In the mean time, get ready to learn the "howto" of Effective Email Campaigns in my upcoming two-week course starting September 28th. You'll learn how to use each of these email marketing systems to attract new and repeat customers to your business. Space is limited so register now for Email Campaigns and Newsletters.
