Email Marketing | Mailchimp

I’ve tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent email newslet­ter pro­grams. The leader seems to be Con­stant Con­tact fol­lowed by iCon­tact and Mailchimp. Although I have a lot of clients who already use Con­stant Con­tact, my per­son­al favorite is Mailchimp. Why? Because it is smart and easy to use. Now, when I say easy to use, I mean it is eas­i­er to use than most email mar­ket­ing pro­grams. You still have to know some­thing about design and work­ing with tem­plates. What I like about Mailchimp is they’ve made it easy to import and update your list and cre­ate a sim­ple, yet attrac­tive look­ing email cam­paign. The report­ing sys­tems and Social Media plu­g­ins also make Mailchimp the leader in my expe­ri­ence. Their web­site design and func­tion is also…way bet­ter than its competitors.

Mailchimp also has a free ver­sion! No really…it is free. If you have less than 500 emails in your data­base, use Mailchimp as much as you want! It is 100% free! If you go over the 500 email list (hope­ful­ly you will over time!) then the fees are sim­i­lar to Con­stant Con­tact or iCon­tact. $20 – 40 a month is typ­i­cal. I rec­om­mend not doing the month­ly plans with any email sys­tem unless you plan on using it every month. If it is every quar­ter or even 6x a year, go with the ​“Pay as you Go” plan. Mailchimp has that fea­ture, and it is pret­ty inex­pen­sive (cheap­er than the month­ly ser­vice in most cases).

Although I am endors­ing Mailchimp, that does not mean it is a per­fect pro­gram. There are lit­tle bugs and quirks if you don’t know HTML. For exam­ple, when you cut and paste things, the text some­times gets messed up. This is not Mailchim­p’s fault but just the nature of the beast. They use what is called a ​“wysi­wyg” edi­tor which stands for ​“What You See Is What You Get.” That wysi­wyg con­verts your sim­ple text edi­tor into HTML. That is where you will some­times see some for­mat­ing prob­lems. To avoid this, hire your web design­er to cre­ate and send a cus­tom CSS email just for your com­pa­ny. In oth­er words, if you are not real web-savvy, I’d def­i­nite­ly get help cre­at­ing and send­ing email blast. Email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns should have the same or sim­i­lar brand­ing mes­sage and design as your oth­er mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. A lot of peo­ple think email mar­ket­ing is cheap. It is inex­pen­sive com­pared to a Direct Mail cam­paign, but you should still spend some time and mon­ey mak­ing it look sharp and useful!

Anoth­er email tool I’d rec­om­mend is: MyEm­ma. MyEm­ma is a MUST for some­one who wants a cus­tom email mar­ket­ing cam­paign. This is for seri­ous email marketers.