Why Use an Email Marketing Program?
Email can be a great way to get your message to a lot of people in a short period of time. It’s by no means the only tool – but in today’s world, it’s vital. But how are you managing your mass email communication?
The old-fashioned way of just sticking 500 email addresses in the “to:” field in Outlook or Hotmail just isn’t cutting it anymore. For one thing, you’ve got no idea how many people are actually opening your email. No way of knowing how effective it is. You’re also much less likely to get your emails read if you send them that way. Do this enough, and your email account could very well get you tagged as a spammer. It’ll also crowd your inbox with every delayed delivery and rejection notice.
From experience, I once found my email address was being blocked by Yahoo as spam. I was getting complaints from people that they weren’t getting my emails, and eventually, I noticed the pattern, that they were all Yahoo addresses.
Furthermore, it’ll also save you the hassle of manually removing people from your list. If people want off your list, then can unsubscribe themselves, saving you the time of doing it manually. It will also keep you in compliance with spam laws.
There are a lot of other features for sales that I’ll cover in later emails, in terms of tracking the behavior of potential customers. But for right now, I’ll just be covering the basics of sending out regular correspondence.
Comparing Three Mass Email Programs
An email management program will help you manage your contact lists. It’ll let you manage lists subgroups easily – so that you can target your emails to the people who really should be getting them. There are an awful lot of mass email programs on the market. They all have different pricing systems and slightly different features. It’s enough to make your head spin.
So I’m going to simplify it to the ones that I have experience with.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is probably the most well-known, and it’s the one I started out on. I had a boss who swore by it, so I used it. It’s also the most expensive, particularly for smaller organizations. After a free trial, you’re going to be spending at least $20 a month for 0-500 contacts, and $45 for 501-2500 contacts. It’s probably the best graphically on the market – but the price is a killer. If you’re a huge organization, with a list of 2500 people, it could be a good deal for you. The other thing they offer is pretty good customer service. Someone will call you. If you’re a beginner, this can be really helpful.
When I moved from Maine to Connecticut, I gave Constant Contact a try on the trial basis. I really, really liked it. Until it came time to get it paid for, and it wasn’t in the budget. So I need an alternative that had all the features I liked – and fit the budget of $0.
MailChimp
That’s where MailChimp came in. It’s free for your first 2,500 contacts. After that, it does start to get expensive. It’s got a lot of great features. It’s easy to use, and pretty good to look at. It gives you great statistics as to who is opening your emails, and compares it to the industry average. I find it really intuitive to use. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience in graphic design, you can put together a pretty good looking email newsletter in a few minutes.
So you get most of the important features of Constant Contact, without spending any money. You also get really effective reports which will help you figure out which topics your audience is responding to best, and which times are best to send out your emails.
SendinBlue
When my lists grew past 2,500 people, I had to start looking around for an alternative to MailChimp. SendinBlue lets you have unlimited contacts. You actually get billed on the number of emails you send every month. If you’re below 40,000, it’s free. At 40,000+ it’s $7.37 a month. The biggest drawback is that you don’t get the quality reports like you get with MailChimp or Constant Contact until you get to the $39 level. You won’t know who clicked on what in your email.
One very cool feature that SendinBlue offers is text support. You can build a text list, and send out texts for as about around penny a text. Statistics show that emails will get opened about 20% of the time (usually higher for nonprofits), but texts will get read 90% of the time – and usually within three minutes.
I’ve used all three, and the deciding factor for me would be 1) your budget, and 2) the features you want. If you’ve got fewer than 2,500 contacts on your list, I’d say MailChimp might be your best bet. If you’re above that, and you’ve actually got a budget, you might want to look at Constant Contact. Now, if you’re over 2,500, and you don’t have a lot of money to spend, then you may want to give SendinBlue a try.
You can create a free account with all of them to try them out. See which one you like the best.
There are other such programs on the market – these are the three I have a great deal of familiarity with. If there’s a program that you use, please feel free to mention it in the comments below.
Automated Features
One other really, really nice feature is the ability to automate these emails. I used to set up a recurring meeting reminder to my committees about upcoming meetings. I could sit down and in 5 minutes set up all my meeting reminders for the year. You write your simple email reminder, and set when you want it to deliver. This will have a real impact on the attendance at your meetings. People have a lot of things going on, and reminding them is easy. The ability to automate this will be really helpful for you when your schedule gets hectic.
Website / Social Media Integration
The other thing you really want to have set up with your website is some sort of email capture. If you go to my website, it’s going to ask you to sign up for my mailing list. I’ve set this up with a plugin from MailChimp that will ask you to sign up once a week, and then go away – though there are many programs that have similar features. If people have taken the time to visit your website, you should feel confident enough to ask them for their email address. Make sure your page has some way of capturing their email address, either by a pop-up, or by the box at the bottom of this article.
Talk with your website developer about creating one. If you don’t have a website, contact me, and we can create one for you.
Make it friendly, “Thanks for visiting (Our Organization’s) Website, Join Our Mailing List, and don’t miss a thing.” or something like that.
People who visit your website are leads – potential members, supporters, donors, etc. You’ve found some way to drive them to your site, either by a Google search, a Facebook post, or some other ad. Don’t let them get away. Keep the sales funnel moving.
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Thank you for all that you do, and have a great day!
Photo by Sean MacEntee 