Five Reasons to Consider a Professional Email Marketing Provider

Most website owners would agree that having a robust marketing strategy will pay dividends and somewhere in that mix should be regular contact with your clients by email. In my time I've seen a myriad of solutions to the need to keep in contact by email ranging from using MS Outlook with customer addresses in the cc box (shudder - please don't ever do that!) to using MS Word and MS Access to mail merge out.

For those that find themselves in the situation of having an email marketing strategy that isn't quite working, consider these five pointers to engaging a professional email marketing company.

Firstly, however, let's deal with the obvious: Are we talking big bugs? Site like www.constantcontact.com offer packages from $15 per month which I hope won't break the bank and will earn a reward very quickly.

Trusted

I'm sure your inbox like mine gets a fair deluge of spam every day. Although some carry unsubscribe links I'm always very wary of clicking on them. You see if an unscrupulous mailer has included an unsubscribe link then chances are that clicking this link will simply prove to them that you saw the email, are a real person and they'll flag you for yet more junk mail.

Professional marketing houses always signify somewhere on the email who sent it and because that's often a trusted brand people are more willing to click unsubscribe. OK, so why should you be pleased about someone unsubscribing? Well, think of it in terms of a person being more willing to sign up in the first place if they know they can easily unsubscribe at any point.

Can bypass spam traps

Spending a lot of money on a bespoke mailing application may backfire significantly if all of the sent email gets caught in a spam trap. Flagged as spam, they never reach the users inbox which means you never get the exposure you crave - and that the customer has signed up to receive.

When composing a message on a professional marketing tool these spam checks can be done prior to sending. For example, is your subject line all capitals and are there lots of IP address links in the body of your email? If the answer to either is yes probably best to forget sending it until it's been reviewed.

Managed subscribe/unsubscribe

Keeping track and manually updating the recipient list can be a bit of chore after a while. With subscribe forms and unsubscribe links, however, marketing web sites can manage this for you and you simply get informed (in summary if you like) about what activity has taken place.

Statistical Tracking

If you write about something in your newsletter than recipients like then you want to know about it. Having the ability to track how many people clicked on which links (and even who it was!) is a great boon to ensuring you get the email even more focused next time.

The marketing companies can even identify how many of your emails have actually been looked at, although due to default privacy settings on software like MS Outlook this number may actually be far lower than it is in reality. It's a useful guide, anyhow, particularly comparatively over many newsletter sends.

Email archiving visibility

One final feature which has proved to be quite useful for a number of businesses is the ability to view the email on a website instead of in your inbox. Not only does this allow you to link to your latest email or newsletter for those that didn't receive it but it does away with the problem of display restrictions on some users email readers.

For example if I only read plain text emails and you've sent me a nicely formatted email I will see a message at the top that says something like Click here to read this email. I'm probably far happier doing that then risking the display of the email in my own email client.

So there you have it; some ideas on why spending a few dollars a month can give your email marketing campaign a significant boost. As always, if there is anything that I or anyone at Emerging Innovations can help with please don't hesitate to get in touch.