Why Should You Use An Email Marketing Service Provider to Send Your Ezine or Email Newsletter?
Way back when, at the start of my career, I periodically sent out HTML email marketing messages to a big list of my clients and prospects about a service or new opportunity. At the time HTML email marketing was fairly new to the marketing world, and wasn’t yet widely adopted.
I made the mistake, as did many others, of sending these messages right from Outlook like I did with all of my other email messages. Why not, right?
Wrong! More wrong that I ever thought.
In fact, one day certain people stopped receiving email from me completely! I went into panic mode pretty quickly because my whole business used email as its main form of communication, and this was a disaster. I did some research and quickly found out I was flagged as a spammer by one large email company because I was sending several email messages with the same subject line and messages to very large groups of people!
It took a lot of work to get back into that provider’s good graces, including tons of phone calls, emails, applications and even some begging. After that, I made it my mission to learn everything I could about email marketing, HTML email, spam laws, and service providers — one of which became my best new email asset.
Now my team and I, through Effortless Entrepreneur Ezines, a service of Bourn Creative, work day in and day out to help entrepreneurs and small business owners just like you add email marketing and custom designed HTML ezines to their online marketing toolbox and we help you get your email marketing account setup with your service provider.
The Effortless Entrepreneur Ezines team can also work with you to develop:
- Email marketing management with the service provider of your choice
- A three, six, or twelve month content plan with optimized article headlines
- Ezine article copywriting and content repurposing
- Custom HTML email newsletter, ezines, or email blast template design
- Email marketing account setup and opt-in form integration
- Ezine issue coordination and implementation
- Thank you, landing and squeeze page creation
- Auto responder setup and management
- Hands-on training
Effortless Entrepreneur Ezines
Recommended Email Marketing Service Providers
To do any type of email marketing, you have to set up an account with an email marketing service provider. These service providers enforce strict email rules, work tirelessly to keep their servers white-listed (liked) by the internet service providers / email providers, provide you the ability to track and measure your email marketing campaign results, and manage your email marketing list subscribes and unsubscribes.
There are a lot of email marketing service providers available for you to use online and I am often asked, “Which is the right one for me and my business?” The key to answer that question is knowing what you intend to do with your list, what size your list is, how often you will be sending emails to your list, and how you plan to use your list. Then you can compare that information with the features of each individual provider. The features vary from provider to provider, but one area where they vary greatly is how the service is paid for.
For example:
- Some services providers charge you an account setup fee and some do not.
- Some service providers charge you a specified fee to send an unlimited number of emails, while others charge only when a message is sent.
- Some service provider’s determine fees by the size of your list or how often you send email marketing messages to your list.
When evaluating service providers, be sure to look at the features they offer and verify they offer services you want to use or add-on in the future. Find out if they offer only one autoresponder message or the capability to send an entire autoresponder campaign, if you can have multiple lists with separate opt-ins, and learn how you can customize your email templates and what tracking options are available.
Here is a list of some of the more popular email marketing service providers you will find on the Internet. The providers marked with an asterisk (*), are the providers I currently work with, or have worked with in the past for either myself or my clients.
