Email Marketing: The Basics
Reaching a targeted or selected audience for your brand or product is crucial! Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn have been in the hot seat for quite some time and are all good ways of branching out to prospective clients and customers. Marketers and businesses are bombarding customers with Facebook ads, tweets, linked in pages and Pinterest boards. With that being said maybe it’s time for a refreshing change. Have you considered email marketing?
Although sometimes overlooked due to the occurrence of new social media trends, the power of the email inbox still retains its position amongst powerful social media tools. Email marketing is a great way to directly reach subscribers who value your information but may not have time to seek it out on the web. As with most things its best to get your feet wet first as opposed to dive in headfirst. Here are four useful sites to help facilitate email marketing and e-news letters.
Mail Chimp is a fast and easy way to get started. Its features allow you create campaigns and build lists of people who will receive your e-news letters. You can chose from custom made e-news templates or create your own unique style. Once completed, with only the click of a button Mail Chimp will send out your e-news letter to hundreds or thousands of subscribers instantly. They even have advanced tracking features that allow you to analyze your results. Its coolest feature is custom translations to aid the dissemination across languages.
Campaign monitor is designed for the more advanced persona. It again allows for the user to create campaigns, organize lists and then send to hundreds of subscribers. Reporting analytics is also offered. The cool feature from campaign monitor is that it focuses more on customer template design and even allows the designer to rebrand and resell products to their clients. Campaign Monitor fully supports this.
Mad Mimi aims at making email news-letters the simplest yet most visually appealing as possible. It offers a wide variety of beautifully crafted templates and themes along with east to use design interfaces. A unique customer service feature allows you to chat directly with developers and even the owners of the site. However by far the most intriguing aspect of Mad Mimi is their advanced list and segmentation features which allow you to create virtually endless lists as well as segment them how you see fit.
Constant Contact offers more complex services in addition to email marketing and has established itself as a much larger player on the email news letter scene. Complimentary features include event marketing, online surveying and social campaigns. In addition to e-news letters SaveLocal is a unique feature to their service bundle. The program allows you to create and sell shareable deals and coupons with customers and subscribers.
