Choosing An Email Marketing Platform
An email marketing platform is a software or a service used to create a newsletter. The platform allows you to schedule email broadcasts to your newsletter subscribers, schedule follow up email messages to be sent to a subscriber after a pre determined period of time.
The home for your newsletter. Many consider it to be the foundation of an online business. The choice of service or software to use for email marketing is VERY important because once you start gathering subscribers, moving your newsletter to a new service or software may
- cost money – you may have to hire a web developer to export the subscribers from the database. This is if your autoresponder software or service doesn’t have a export to CSV file feature.
- cost time - you have to wait on your web developer to export the subscribers from your web application to a csv file.
- cost subscribers – third party email marketing service require subscribers to confirm joining your newsletter again if you are importing them with a csv file. They do this to ensure that spammers cannot misuse their service by importing vast databases of email addresses that they don’t have permission to contact. This prevents their servers and ip addresses (which cost money) from getting blacklisted by spam directories. But requiring subscribers to opt-in again will surely cause you to lose some of them.
The choice of email marketing software is like buying a laptop. You do it once and hopefully don’t change for a long long time.
The Email Marketing Platform CheckList
Below are some features that are necessary beyond the very basic functionality of a email newsletter software of taking subscribers and sending broadcasts.
Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a .csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.
Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.
Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.
Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.
Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.
Third Party Autoresponders
Below are some autoresponder services that are highly reputed 2 of which I have used in the past.
- Aweber – This is the most popular email marketing service. The de facto standard for online autoresponder service. Has the more features than any other autoresponder service. I terminated the account because I didn’t need it anymore.
- GetResponse – Very similar in features and pricing to Aweber.
- MailChimp - This is a very good email autoresponder service if you are just starting out. It allows you to have upto 500 subscribers for free. In the free account they insert an ad for their service in your outgoing email.
Which one is for you?
If you are short on cash go with MailChimp. Use their autoresponder feature judiciously to make some money, reinvest your earnings to upgrade your account.If you can afford to spend money, go with Aweber. They are very easy to use and have more features, especially the email analytics feature, than any other autoresponder.
Advantage of 3rd Party Email Newsletter Software:
Higher Deliverability: Paid autoresponder services have an agreement with the major ISPs so that emails that are sent by their clients don’t get blacklisted as spam. Emails that are sent using these services don’t land in the Junk mail folder or rejected on receipt.
Actually, the deliverability between a self hosted and a paid autoresponder service is the same. All email that is sent by a self hosted email autoresponder will get delivered, initially. However with self hosted email autoresponders, there is a higher risk of your server getting blacklisted as spam in some spam server directory like spamhaus. When that happens your email deliverability will go down as a lot of subscribers will either not receive your email or will get them in the junk email folder
Cost Can Be Predicted: With third party autoresponders, you will not have unforeseen expenses. The cost of Aweber for a year starting with 2000 subscribers and growing at 100 subscribers a day can be predicted.
Disadvantages of Hosted Email Marketing Tools:
Charge By Subscriber Count – Most autoresponder services charge depending on the number of subscribers in your newsletter. More the subscribers you get, the costlier it becomes. It used to be the case that it costed $19 a month whether you had 1000 or 100,000 subscribers at Aweber. But you can’t get that pricing anymore.
Importing Lists Require Confirmation From Subscribers – Sometimes you may want to import subscribers from another email autoresponder service through a CSV file. When you do this with paid autoresponder services like Aweber, they will send an email to each subscribers in your import file confirming if they want to be in your new newsletter. This is a problem because you will lose some subscribers as a result of this import.
Self Hosted Email Newsletter Software
Self hosted email autoresponders are web applications that you install in your web server.
PHPList – This is a free open source software. It is the oldest and the most widely used one. Unfortunately it is extremely user-unfriendly. It can be difficult to use. The subscription form code cannot be generated and copied to your own web page if you don’t have knowledge of HTML as PHPList provides its own subscription page even which is a bit difficult to customize. You can use it if you are comfortable with editing HTML code.
WP Responder WordPress Plugin – This is the plugin I created for my blog. I needed an alternative to buying an autoresponder service and the available RSS feed to Email services like FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. With this plugin you can create newsletters, create follow up messages for subscribers to receive, provide email subscription to your blog, use blog posts as follow up email, provide subscription to particular categories in your blog.
Which one is for you?
I recommend using WP Responder to build a newsletter because it is much easier to install this plugin – you don’t have to create an additional database. The installation is the same as any other wordpress plugin. You can easily learn to use it even if you don’t know coding. I made WP Responder with Internet Marketers in mind. I took the best features from Aweber and added them to the WordPress dashboard in a way you would expect them to be there. Click here to download WP Responder.
Mosh-Toshi E-mailmarketingplatform February 26th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I want to add a point of attention to the list given above
Wenn you choose an e-mailmarketingplatform not only choose factors like deliverability, CPM etcetera, but check out the customer service before you sign a contract too. Cause if you have a problem with your mailings or something else and you don’t get the help you need as fast as you need, it could destroy the ROI of your mailing when it cant go out on time. Or is sent wrong because you didnt get help on time.
We, from the E-mailmarketingplatform Moshi-Toshi for instance, always take care of a good customer service. The succes of your mailing relies for a big part on that good customer service
Liveazee May 25th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
For most small businesses opting for third party marketing platform is quite expensive (more so in case of India!)
It took time for me to learn PHPlist, but it is worth the effort & what is usually best about installing your application is the absolute control over what & how you do your email marketing.
The issue of spam still remains but with due diligence in your setup, this can be reduced or even prevented.
The bigger issue according to me in relation to email marketing is getting subscribers & most of it has got to do with your content. If you get down to advertising your products & NOT give something useful to your subscribers, you are well on your way to losing subscribers & being marked as spam.