Email marketing

[Flossie]

I am trying to look at the various options available for providing e-mail newsletters and could really do with some advice about what sorts of things to look for/avoid. Does anyone have have any recommendations? I only have a small potential mailing list at present, and an even smaller budget!

Many thanks.:confused1:

[Nicholas]

Hi Flossie,

Have you tried companies like Campaign Monitor? You can basically choose a template, personalise it so that it is clearly a newsletter coming from your company, and then there is a small fee for every time you send out an email to your group.

They also provide you with data on who opened the email, which pages of your site they clicked through to etc.

I think this route is one of the most cost-effective means to install and run a regular newsletter...

[Green Beginnings]

Thanks for that tip Nicholas. That sounds good. Let us know how you find it if you use it Flossie.
Can you send e-newsletters without asking your customers if they would like to receive them?

[greenmonkeystore]

Hi GBeginings.

EU Privacy Law states that you cannot send unsolicited marketing emails to individuals without gaining consent also you need to make it easy for people to be able to subscribe from them as well.
We have just sent our first one and I did it on publisher and sent it through outlook putting my mailing list in BCC so it would not show anyones email address, well that is what I hope happened have not had any emails so far.
Hope this helps

Mark

[Flossie]

Thanks for the info Nicholas & greenmonkeystore - I hadn't come across Campaign Monitor before. Will let you know how I get on GBeginnings!
I had been looking at Graphic Mail, which seems to offer similar features, but looks like you have to either sign up for a monthly fee or an annual fee, which I don't really want to commit to at this stage. The 'pay as you go' approach from Campaign Monitor is definitely more appealing for now.

[Ike]

I've used Campaign Monitor and it's pretty simple and easy to understand. I've also used a few other email marketing sites for sending out newsletters, and Campaign Monitor ranked up there as one of the best I've used.

Although, it's a little more on the pricy side.. in my opinion. I currently use StreamSend.com and I like them. They're decent, not spectacular. Aweber is another good one that i've used in the past. There's a few other sites out there you could probably find via a google search.

[Flossie]

Thanks Ike.
In addition to Campaign Monitor, I have also been looking at Graphic Mail - www.graphicmail.co.uk . Has anyone had any experience of them or heard of them at all?

[NaturalChoices]

I use PHPlist, phplist.com : Homepage : home , an opensource piece of kit that is both free and manages the subscribe/unsubscribe issue very well, including a nice legal thingy called double opt in, whereby a user subscribes and is then sent a confirmation e-mail which they have to click. It requires a little know how to get it up and running on your server/site, but you can have a few lists like I do, and once you have a nice templet e-mailiung is easy. It also does both plain text e-mails and html ones- though be warned the plain text ones come out like a dogs dinner so you need a line at the top like, @If you can't read this e-mail click here to view as a webpage- then you pop up the newsletter as a webpage- link it into an archive and your site got bigger by a page.

On the legal side of spam, opt in and all. The law is slightly different for a business to business list and a business to consumer list.

Businesses can send unsolicitated e-mails to other businesses as long as there is an an unsubscribe function (which is honored.)

Business to consumer, even association to individual, however requires than the user has requested the e-mail, by say clicking a box that says "I would like the latest news on products from Eco Company X", and then has doubled confirmed (The double opt-in) by clicking on a confirmation link, sent after the event by e-mail to the stated e-mail address.

Please note if the box is one that is already ticked then the default tick has to be on the no box.

Sorry to be boring, I use to do this stuff for a living..

Pete

[Organnics]

Hi,

Sorry I'm a bit late to this topic.

I use constant contact. It costs around £10 per month, but you get to try it for free for a limited period if you have less than 100 contacts, which is good to get the gist of it.

Hope that helps :D

[Organic Baby]

For small campaigns (less than 500 subscibers) I use MailChimp which is free!

Remember that you MUST have received permission to send an email newsletter - just because you have their email address does not mean you can bombard them with your newsletter.
The best way to cover your back is via a 'double opt-in' system, so that when someone signs up for your newsletter, you send them one email asking them to confirm that they really do want to receive - means that you do not get subscriberes that have been 'helpfully' signed up by someone else.

For a really useful email marketing guide, try http://www.mailchimp.com/guides/free_guide.pdf
even though they are obviously promoting their own product, and who can blame them :-) the information it contains is great.