By Deborah Carraro
One of the questions that is often on the minds of online entrepreneurs is “What are the best services for my online business?”
I’m regularly asked for my input and my recommendation to one client is inevitably different from another. It would be easy to recommend only one service but I tend to shy away from blanket solutions and prefer to consider the unique needs of each client and their specific business.
As a result, I’ve been exposed to several different autoresponder / shopping cart services and can help you choose the right one for you.
If you’re just starting your online business, chances are that you have little to no funds to allocate to your email marketing initiatives. While you may be tempted to skip this all together and focus on other aspects of building your business, the truth is that you need to start building your mailing list from DAY 1 of your online business.
There are several low budget (or no budget) options but my experience has been that the services listed below are by far the best. Let’s review them together:
- Ezine Director: One of my first clients was looking for a cost-effective solution to start launch her newsletter. Her budget: $0.00. As she had no mailing list at all, Ezine Director was the perfect solution for her. It allowed us to set up free account which had many of the same features as the paid service but limited the number of active subscriptions to 249 subscribers.
I was able to design an HTML template to use with the service and incorporating the sign-up form into her website was extremely easy. What I like best about the service is that it offers many of the tracking features that are commonly unavailable with free accounts. I’m sure you’ve heard me mention before that metrics are key to your ability to improve services and offerings so having the tracking stats available helped us quickly grow our subscriber base.
Good fit for:
- start up entrepreneurs with no email marketing budget
- email marketers who have less than 249 readers
- someone with HTML coding skills if you want to send an HTML newsletter
- Constant Contact:
Constant Contact: Another option if you have no budget for email marketing services is Constant Contact. They have a 60-day trial but they limit your trial account size to 100 subscribers. Once the trial is over, the pricing is more expensive than Ezine Director but they offer a few features that the former does not offer.
New to the service is a survey feature which is a separate charge from the email marketing service but that’s not what makes them stand apart from Ezine Director.
Constant Contact is one of the first services that offered built-in newsletter templates. You didn’t need to have a special template designed or have any special knowledge of HTML coding. You simply selected a template and started typing. Quite a few of my clients used (and still use) Constant Contact simply for the ease of use in sending out a newsletter.
The metrics are comparable if not better than Ezine Director so it will allow you to track valuable information that will help you grow your business.
If you’re on a limited budget, however, this service is appealing because it can be mastered by even the most non-technical entrepreneur – so there’s no need to hire someone to manage your newsletter requirements.
The only drawback to the service (and I’ll add a disclaimer here to state that it’s been about four years since I last used the service and things may have changed in the interim) is that it’s notorious for being blacklisted. I had one client who could not even receive her own newsletter because it was blacklisted by her ISP! Recent changes in Can-Spam legislation hopefully helped Constant Contact resolve many of their listing issues but again, I cannot be certain as it has admittedly been several years since I’ve used the service.
Good fit for:
- start up entrepreneurs with no email marketing budget
- email marketers who have less than 100 readers
- marketers wanting to keep their newsletter production in-house rather than outsourcing to a virtual assistant
- an easy-to-use niche finder
- a “fill-in-the-blanks” wizard-supported salesletter writer that’ll help you write winning copy
- a simple “point-and-click” website builder that will help you create your own unique, professional looking website
- a fully-integrated payment system to accept online payments
- full domain registration and hosting services – so you don’t have to waste time trying to find these services
Coming next week: We’ll discover one of the most popular autoresponder services used by many successful online entrepreneurs.
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Thank you for the kind words about Constant Contact, however, I did want to clarify the blacklist issue you mentioned. Deliverability and CAN-SPAM compliance are top concerns for us, and due to the strong relationships we have built with all of the major Internet Service Providers, the delivery rate of our customers’ messages to their recipients’ inboxes is consistently above 97% (as measured by ReturnPath, Inc). This deliverability rate is significantly higher than the industry average. Our templates are also format tested in most email environments to make sure that email campaigns — whether HTML or text — look great when they are received. We are also a co-founder of the Email Sender and Provider Coalition and a member of Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, through which we advocate for small businesses and associations in the fight against spam.
Hi Len
Thanks for stopping by and clarifying the blacklist issue. As I mentioned in my post, it has been about 4 years since I used your service and I do know that there was a blacklist issue with bellnet at that point. Thanks for letting me know about your diligence in working for CAN-SPAM compliance. I will send out an update to my group about your thoughtful note to let them know about the changes.
Thanks again!
~ Deborah 🙂
Hi,
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