Email marketing is seeing a bit of a resurgence lately. An effective email marketing campaign can create lucrative results when used properly. Whether selling a product, strengthening a relationship, or increasing brand awareness, the email inbox is a still a powerful platform to connect with consumers.
As mentioned in the previous post The (Forgotten) Power of Email, there are four powerful reasons why email is still effective. However, as convincing as those four reasons are….you might want to just dip your toes into the water as opposed to diving headfirst into the email game.
The best way to do that is get acquainted with the various email marketing providers to see which one will be the best fit for your needs. If this is your first time implementing an email campaign, starting off light and simple will be much less intimidating and easier to maintain consistency. That’s why we put together a list of 4 email marketing providers that cater to simplicity and are inexpensive with starter options.
Mail Chimp
Mailchimp is simple yet powerful. They provide an email platform that can be as strong and feature-rich as you need it to be, whether large or small.
Cool Features:
- Inbox Inspector provides you with more than 60 screenshots of what your email will look like in all the major email clients.
- Email Beamer is a workflow that allows you to email your campaign to MailChimp at a private email address and then confirm and send your created campaign by replying to the subsequent autoresponder. All of this without even having to log in to MailChimp.
- Custom Translations allows you to easily create a multilingual campaign without the rigor of manually looking up each word.
Used By:
- Angry Birds
- Brooklyn Brainery
- Vice UK
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor markets to designers and their clients. While this provider scales to more robust options, they also help beginners entering the fray.
Cool Features:
- Interactive Charts that are great for visually digesting the reporting and analytics of a successful campaign.
- 100% Private Label means that you can markup and resell the products and services provided by Campaign Monitor.
- A Comprehensive Help System is there to guide you along the way as you create and send beautiful newsletters.
Used By:
- Nike
- eBay
- Apple
Mad Mimi
Mad Mimi’s aim is to be simple and beautiful. They want the process to be as inviting and visually appealing as possible.
Cool Features:
- Beautiful looking templates means that you can be confident that once your emails are opened, the reader will be pleased with the aesthetics.
- They offer a customer service chat which is manned by developers, designers, and even owners of the company.
- Their list management is very feature rich allowing you to maintain an unlimited number of lists, segmentation, as well as bulk importing and deletion.
Used By:
- Squidoo
- Get Satisfaction
- Timbuk2
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a larger, more established player in the game with a wealth of information and resources. They focus on email marketing, event marketing, social campaigns and daily deals.
Cool Features:
- SaveLocal is an awesome way for your business to get involved in the daily deals managed by you and not a third-party company.
- All campaigns have easy integration with the popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
- They offer free personal coaching and support by phone, email, chat, and even in person.
Used By:
- Boston Duck Tours
- The Chocolate Bar
- Staffing Advisors
Takeaway
The pricing for these four companies are very competitive. Each one offers a freemium plan to help get you started. As your list and campaigns grow, these email providers will also scale and grow with you. If you have had experience with any of the four providers above, please let us know in the comments section whether good or bad. We’d love to get your input and hopefully help others as they are seeking a vendor for email marketing.
Author Bio: Blake is a marketing manager at You Design It, a promotional products company.
Maybe one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The concept behind WRAPmail is to utilize the facts that almost everyone have websites, social network site(s) and also send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. WRAPmail is available for free (with 3rd party ads) or for a small license fee at http://www.wrapmail.com. No routines change as users simply download a toolbar or routes emails via Google or WRAPmail’s servers.
WRAPmail also helps search for missing children with every email sent by free users incorporating an RSS feed from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children – see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rolv-e-heggenhougen/finding-missing-children_b_1540866.html