Email marketing is a great way for you to connect with potential and existing and clients. *Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $400 million on email marketing in 2006. With so many email marketing solutions available to businesses it can be difficult for the uninitiated to pick a solution that meets their needs.

At Rhizome we help many clients create and implement effective email marketing strategies. While doing this we have used several of the most popular email marketing solutions available today. Presented below are brief summaries on some of the major players in the market today. Hopefully it will help you to create an effective email marketing strategy that suits you and your company.

The cost of these services can vary depending on the size of your email list and on how many emails you intend to send on a monthly basis. Most of the services offer a 30 day free trial which allows you to shop around and find the one that best fits your needs.

Constant Contact

Pros

• Offers helpful and thorough customer support
• Has an easy-to-use system for adding and managing contacts
• Offers comprehensive reports analyzing subscriber actions
• Templates offered are incredibly flexible
• Allows you to import contacts from Outlook
• Allows unsubscribers to fill out feedback form
• Allows you to create an A/B test campaign

Cons

• Offers 1.7 MB of picture hosting (Industry Benchmark is 5-10MB)

Constant Contact has a great Contact Management system and incredibly knowledgeable Customer Support. However, they only allow you to host five images. Which means you will either have to host your images elsewhere or pay for extra image storage. The Constant Contact admin is easy to use, offers a multitude of templates and is a favorite with both beginners and advanced users.

Constant Contact has been very popular with our clients and the feedback we have received in regards to their service has been positive.

MailChimp

Pros

• Has an easy-to-use system for adding and managing contacts
• Offers comprehensive reports analyzing subscriber actions
• Allows unsubscribers to fill out feedback form
• Allows you to create an A/B test campaign
• Pricing by number of emails and by number of contacts is available
• Offers Google Analytics integration

Cons

• Does not have telephone customer support
• Difficult to style items, be ready to compromise your design

MailChimp does well with Contact Management and Analyzing. They could use more flexibility in the Email Creation process. MailChimp’s Customer Support was found to be direct and courteous through email and live chat services, but they do not offer phone support.

Currently MailChimp’s service is free if you have less than 2,000 subscribers. This makes it a very cost effective choice for businesses with a smaller client base.

Vertical Response

Pros

• Offers flexible and easy-to-use templates and email editor
• Offers helpful and thorough customer support
• Offers comprehensive reports analyzing subscriber actions
• Offers 25MB of picture hosting (Industry Benchmark is 5-10MB)
• Someone checks and approves your email before it is sent out to subscribers.
• Allows you to create an A/B test campaign
• Offers Google Analytics integration

Cons

• Does not have an auto responder
• Does not have a spam checking tool
• Reports offered do not accurately reflect users’ actions

Vertical Response has excellent Customer Support and Email Creation tools. They also offer a large amount of picture hosting space for your emails. Vertical Response does a good job on Email Deliverability because they have a real person checking your email before it is sent out, but they do not have an automatic tool that scans it for spam.

iContact

Pros

• Offers helpful and thorough customer support
• Allows you to import contacts from Outlook

Cons

• Doesn’t offer free removal of logo from emails
• Reports offered do not accurately reflect users’ actions

iContact does a good job on Contact Management because they allow you to import contacts from Outlook. While they are lacking a few features, including integration with Google Analytics and the free removal of their logo from emails, we found their Customer Support to be quick and helpful. They do well with Email Deliverability due to the high percentage of emails that went through and their spam checking tool.

We found that their WYSIWYG editor to be somewhat limited but easy to use. A HTML editor is available for advanced users.

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If you are interested in creating your own email marketing strategy and would like more information on how Rhizome can help you please do not hesitate to contact us.

* – WikiPedia/DMA: “The Power of Direct Marketing: ROI, Sales, Expenditures and Employment in the U.S., 2006-2007 Edition”, Direct Marketing Association, October 2006

Subject Lines - Generally in business applications, good email etiquette starts with a subject line that addresses the actual subject. On most occasions, Rhizome has an internal standard of starting each subject line with the client’s name or acronym and then a specific brief descriptor. This allows us to find emails fast when we need them. The opposite of this would be getting emails with a subject line to the effect of, “Here you go, ” or “Stuff you need.”

Replying to – When replying to emails, make sure to change the subject reply title if you are talking about a completely different subject. Often we have trouble finding client emails because important information can be buried in an email chain of replies.

Reply vs. Reply All – There are two ways to reply to an email. “Reply” will only send the message to the person who sent you the email. “Reply All” will send an email to everyone who received the email. Using “Replay All” is a very useful tool when many people within a company need to be kept up-to-date and informed about what is going on in a project.

BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) – Unless you intentionally want to send an email to a group that needs to communicate with each other (see Reply vs. Reply All), when sending email blasts to large groups of people, it is a good idea to protect the identity of your friends or associates by addressing your email to yourself in the “To” address area and then put all other names in the BCC portion of the address area. Doing this keeps all the email addresses of your friends and associates private and protects recipients from being picked up by unwanted spam crawlers.

Attachments - Always make sure that your recipient is able to receive the type of document format you want to send. Always make sure your documents are free of viruses before sending. Good document hygiene is top of the list in quality Web etiquette.

Large Attachments and .Zip - Generally, most email recipients can handle files up to 2-3 MBs. Some larger files may have trouble going through to people who have free accounts with groups like Hotmail or MSN.com because these sites impose limits on the size of files their customers can receive. Always ask your recipient what their bandwidth is capable of handling before sending any large documents or art files via email. If you must send multiple files through email, use a .ZIP utility to ensure your files get through without corruption. In most cases, a zipped file will compress the document(s) down to a more manageable file size. A .ZIP utility exists on both Mac and PC platforms and can be likened to an M&M candy. Coated on the outside to protect the yummy chocolate on the inside. If the files are still too large to send by email, you can “FTP” the files (see below) or burn them to a CD for the recipient.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
If you have a large number of files to send, Rhizome has an FTP site that allows you to upload files directly to the intended recipient. In most cases, you will absolutely want to .ZIP your files before uploading them.

Email is a message that is sent electronically and then, once you check your email, is downloaded directly to your computer via an email program such as Outlook or Eudora. POP (Post Office Protocol) is the standard protocol for receiving email and is built in to most popular email products.

Web Mail is a message that is sent electronically, but when you check your email, your message remains stored on the server. Web mail accounts are accessed through a Web page and have fewer features and less functionality than POP accounts. Hotmail and Yahoo are good examples of Web mail. Web mail accounts are very useful if you travel a lot, as they can be accessed from any computer. Some Web hosts offer both types of services, which means when you’re at your home or office you can use the POP-type service, and when you’re on the road, you can access your emails via the Internet.