Final Thoughts on Email Marketing
Let’s talk about EMSs (Email Marketing Service)s. The first question is why would a company want to use an EMS? There are a number of reasons:
- Emails from a service like Gmail just doesn’t look as nice as an email from an EMS, since EMSs allow for design
- In order to send a large amount of emails from a service like Gmail you either have to BCC everyone or send hundreds of emails individually. An EMS will email everyone for you at once.
- EMSs can tracks everything from opens to clicks to specific subscriber information, Gmail can’t do that.
- With an EMS people can easily subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their preferences without any work on your side.
Currently if I were to guess I would say there are thousands of different EMSs. Many of them are free, many of them are thousands of dollars a month.
I would say this, lower tier has 2 main competitors, Constant Contact and Mailchimp. The higher tier has 4 main competitors:
- Exact Target (owned by Salesforce)
- Silverpop
- Hubspot
- Epsilon
Out of all of the choices I think Mailchimp is the best bang for your buck. I have personally use Mailchimp for years. Before I sing the praises of Mailchimp I will tell you what I HATE about Mailchimp. Mailchimp wants to be more than they are. They are a lot of things, but what are not is a CMS (Customer Management Service, like Salesforce). Mailchimp isn’t over that fact, so they want to manage all of your information.
Mailchimp has click rates, open rates, purchase information, sign up form information, and tons of other pieces of amazing information, yet they keep all of it to themselves. Wouldn’t it be great to have a list of your subscribers with the highest click rate? Or the best sign up form? Or the people with the worst open rate? YES, YES, and YES. Yet, Mailchimp doesn’t care about you, they don’t allow you to have the information, why? I have no idea and it drives me crazy! WHY MAILCHIMP WWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYY?????????!!!!!!!!!!!
That is why I hate Mailchimp. But at the end of the day they are the best option unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to fork over to one of the big guys.
In my next several posts I will tell you why I use Mailchimp, and I think you should too. Then I will give you tips specific to Mailchimp, so if you use a different EMS these posts may not be so helpful.
If you want to sign up to Mailchimp now (it’s free and takes like three minutes) then when we walk through things later it will be much easier. Click here to sign up.
Which EMS do you use?
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