Testing the Email Waters
Posted by heatherrast on August 1st, 2009
Small biz at its best
For small businesses, it can be a challenge to look uber-polished and sophisticated with every communication and customer relationship tactic. If you’re also repositioning and rebranding the company as we are at Ovation, in many way’s it’s on par with a brand new start-up. There’s the Web site, collateral, product sheets, trade show materials to develop. On another level is logowear, corporate gifts of various values, advertising for awareness and image building. There’s also the requisite trade associations, Chambers of Commerce, and more for networking.
The reality is that small business budgets are, well, smaller than that of their mid or large sized counterparts. With an eye on growth – that one “tipping point” win – small business marketers know they can’t afford to be overlooked.
Beautifully Simple
One area I’ve given a lot of thought to is email. Done right, email can be a professional, relatively unobtrusive way to reach a variety of prospects, influentials, and existing customers. Many elements can be placed in a library and re-purposed for multiple “drops,” and of course there’s the power of the visual to draw a reader in (along with well-written content) and lead them to key landing pages.
But which provider was right for us? I had a few essential requirements when I started my search.
My Basic Criteria
- Low monthly cost (or free!)
- Flexible design and layout formats
- Low-level coding requirements
- Tracking and reports for insights
- Flexible list management (we use Highrise for CRM)
The Little Red-Haired Girl
After a lot of evaluation (I confess, I didn’t understand the significance of some of the items listed on
Mad Mimi: email with moxie
various feature sets) I narrowed my choices down to two. Running neck and neck (sharing many of my requirements, and each offering a few “something extra’s”), I chose MadMimi.
In just minutes late the other night, I pulled together a simple email sample and sent it to a few people. Using a few branded graphics I had easy access to, my new email had a masthead, intro paragraph, two stories (each with their own visual), and a footer. There’s no charge for a good long while (we’re still developing a list). It was easy to tell which of my recipients opened theirs (and which didn’t!), and also who forwarded it. I can create separate campaigns for different purposes (say, a drip marketing program for customer development, routine emails for ongoing relationship management, etc.), maintain separate lists, and generate insightful reports that tie into site conversion funnels.
All of this may be all in a day’s work for many – email consultants, direct marketers specializing in digital, developers, and the like. But this was my very first hand’s on creation experience (it’s one thing to receive a slew of them, another to plan and create them for specific use cases!), and I have to say I’m jazzed at the potential. I’m only limited by the time and energy I have to focus on learning all the ins and outs. Not to mention watching the trends…
Other Options and Resources
During my research and with help from others during my Twitter crowdsourcing, I made note of a number of other email providers. Now that we’re in the last leg of planning our first few email campaigns, I’m also paying more attention to articles and posts on the topic. I’ve listed a few of those as well, in case you can use them.
- Exact Target
- Act-On
- SendLoop
- iContact
- Constant Contact
- StreamSend
- Mail Chimp (my runner-up preference)
- Silverpop
- Campaign Monitor
- SendLoop
- Mailer Mailer
- Jason Bayer of Convince & Convert is a leader in email marketing and its possibilities with social
- MarketingProfs continually focuses on great email content, email strategies and email tips
- ChiefMarketer instructs on how to build an email list
- Google even helps for campaign-specific insights, tying email to your Web site
- iMedia Connection has new-school thoughts on email
- Website Magazine offers info on subject lines
Your Turn
Is your small business using email for customer retention or lead development? If so, do you have any good stories to tell? Experiences with a particular provider you’d like to share? Resources to add to the list? Let me know!
Tags: email, email marketing, small business
Have you ever tried MyNewsletterBuilder? They seem to have more features and functions for about the same or less than most of the services on your list…
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:27 pm
No, I haven’t. MadMimi is the only provider I’ve delved deeply into in a hands-on way. I did a lot of research using online search before selecting MM, but didn’t do comparative beta tests. I’ll check ‘em out, thanks!
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Hi –
I just wanted to let you kow that I too am a marketer for a small business and this e-mail has been very informative – I look foward to upcomming ones.
Yvette Cuellar
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Hi, Yvette. Thanks for stopping in! I’m glad this summary was helpful. Truly, there are a lot of ins & outs regarding functionality, interface, data, reporting capabilities…some of which I found I didn’t really know was important to me until I needed it or couldn’t do it.
At this point we’ve a few hundred emails invested…still time to switch if needed, or just to play around.
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Brilliant and useful, especially for a one-person company. Nice to have a “Consumer’s Report” in this subject and I wish I’d seen this before committing to an ESP whose help desk works 9-5 M-F, has no relevant FAQ’s, and whose data can’t parce clicks/forwards/opens coherently. I either have 150 regular readers or 12,000. Can’t tell. And I note their name is not even on the short list!
More! More! What about your customer/prospect database. What do you recommend? Act? Outlook?Other?
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Hey, Charles. I appreciate your comment. Well, this is just one person’s perspective on email service providers, but glad to know it might be useful. I’ve used Mad Mimi’s online chat support and while they were prompt and cheerful, not particularly knowledgeable (which surprised me). It also seems like their FAQ section is driven more by customer language than what I’d call true categorized, indexed responses.
I’m a fan of Signal37 and use Backpack (intranet), Basecamp (client extranet) and Highrise (CRM). Company literature says that Highrise and Mail Chimp (my runner up ESP) integrate well for data import, but I don’t know that firsthand. Good luck! Let me know if you learn anything interesting.
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I’ve been using Mad Mimi first with a free account to test the waters (most email services offer free accts) and then I signed on with their basic plan.
One really great feature is their email address address management. Before I was sending the email more than once but not anymore.
tech support is good too, if you have a question you’ll get a reply back right away either by live chat or email.
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Yup, we tried the free version first. Even then the live chat attendee responded to me, which was nice. Now we’re up a couple levels.
I’m struggling with storing, categorizing, and segmenting email addresses, though. I don’t think I had enough foreknowledge to input the data in the most efficient way (for cross-referencing, later blasts, etc.). Lesson to be learned.
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Mail chimp was my runner up too
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I agree that small businesses need to start taking advantage of email marketing, but I’m disappointed that you didn’t consider SuddenValues.com in your research.
As a top-notch email (and more!) marketing service, we provide local expertise to local business across the US and now in Canada also.
The major difference between ourselves and the email “software providers” you mentioned – we do ALL the work for our clients, from databasing their email list, creating custom bi-monthly email campaigns, delivering the email through our 3rd party certified (Return Path) dedicated servers, and cross-marketing with other local businesses through our local community websites and weekly email updates. We provide a 90-day plan to brainstorm with our clients to create the most effective campaigns and we scrutinize all the measurable data from the previous ninety days to determine it’s effectiveness. We have top quality technicians, marketing specialists and 24/7 service to our local clients, all for a lower overall cost than many of the providers you’ve looked into. Time is money and business owners often don’t have enough hours in a day to run their business as effectively as they’d like to, and adding on the burden of databasing, composing, mailing and measuring their own email campaigns is not cost effective in the least.
Check us out at http://www.suddenvalues.com and while you’re there, feel free to contact us for much more information.
Sincerely,
Laurie Coates,
SuddenValues dealer
Guelph, ON CAN
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Aww, no need to be disappointed. I’ll bet there are at least 10-20 other ESP’s I didn’t note…but only because there had to be a reasonable cut-off point sometime!
Thanks for the 411 on SuddenValues. Wonder if any of the other guys will comment….
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Thanks for this post. It’s very helpful and I’m going to link to it on my blog.
I’m a fundraising director at a medium-sized nom-profit, and have done a fair amount of consulting in the past too, and have tried a few of these. One not on your list that might be worth adding is Vertical Response. If you use Salesforce for your CRM database, Vertical Response plugs right in so you can track your contacts’ interaction with your campaigns. This is good for non-profits as we get Salesforce for free, and Vertical Response gives us 10,000 free emails per month, which is more than enough for most of us smaller orgs. Often free is costly, but in both these cases, the product is high-quality and helps us build relationships with our partners and supporters.
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Mary, thanks for helping out any non-profits that may be reading…I agree, sounds as though NP’s score big with these two technologies made available free.
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Emailvision provides intensive custom reporting, easy to use templates and one to one service at a reasonable monthly cost. Emailvision is one of the leading ESPs worldwide operating with offices in the US and Europe we sent out over 24 billion retention emails alone.
One very popular function is the automated client life cycle management suite which allows you to set up email campaigns based on individual behavior associated with previous campaigns.
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I am intrigued by your mention, Wayne, of individual reader/subscriber behavior leading downstream communications…that’s a piece that MadMimi doesn’t appear to have.
In fact, I’m a little disappointed in the “stats” (Mimi’s term for reports) functionality of the service. Here are a few reasons, things I’ve discovered only since really getting into the program recently:
1) Lack of an easy way to copy out a list of those receipients who view an email (for pasting and sharing with other team members).
2) several clicks from the overall dashboard page to a page where drilled-down info on which recepient clicket what.
3) no way to export all data, aggregate data between email pushes, etc.
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My story is similar to yours but in reverse. I didn’t start out saying I was going to do email, and then research companies, and then settle on Mad Mimi. I had no interest in doing email marketing. What happened to me was me brother showed me Mad Mimi and that made me say jeez it’s easy what the hell and decide to do email marketing. I have no idea if the other companies do the same thing, my guess is probably, but the fact that you chose Mad Mimi after a lengthy process makes me feel even better about using Mad Mimi.
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Well, Bill, I’m definitely no expert in this field. My criteria might vary wildly from someone who has more depth of skill or a larger database of email addresses.
Overall, I’d say I’ve come to better understand the UI. But as I indicated above, reporting isn’t what I’d call robust. I’m seeing a large number of emails sent fall under “Untraced” category, which means they can’t identify it as viewed or unviewed for a couple technical reasons (that deal mostly with Web mail, so still not sure why that would apply to my domain-type email addys). But hey, you never know till you try.
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We looked at a few options (Mad Mimi wasn’t one I considered – never heard of it until now), and ended up settling on Mailchimp. While it has a few quirks as most programs do, overall we are very happy with it and their claim of making things fun is actually true!
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Matthew, do you have anything to share with us regarding Mail Chimp’s reporting capabilities? As you can read above, that’s an area I’m looking for more depth and insight. Would love to know first-hand from a Mail Chimp user like you, since it was my 2nd choice. Thanks!
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This is very helpful. I’m a Mailchimp girl, myself, so I’m curious as to what made Mad Mimi win out. I just visited their site, but didn’t see an obvious “too good to be true,” feature. Can you say more?
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Joy, I wouldn’t say that there was any one “A ha!” moment that made me sway with Mad Mimi. After looking hard at it and Mail Chimp, MM seemed the most out-of-the-box, which was what I really needed at the moment. Now that I know a little more about how the back end of an ESP works (I’m sure there are some similarities), I plan to float a trial campaign through Mail Chimp to get a fair comparison. After all, we use Highrise (a 37 SIgnals CRM product) which is supposed to plug right in to Mail Chimp. Right now, I’m pleased with MM’s overall ease, but feel it lacks reporting depth and I might question some of the deliverabilitly – but that may not be fair given I have no real comparison point.
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I also recommend checking out Vertical Response. Its very low cost pay as you go. So you can buy 10,000 email credits for $0.012 each. The interface is very powerful, and the support is outstanding. I think this is the ideal solution for small businesses.
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heatherrast
Twitter: heatherrast
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Thanks, Richard. I’ll check them out more too.
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