When you’re considering email marketing to help your business flourish, you should look into a few important aspects before making a firm decision on which way to go.

Firstly, somethingI have to advise against…DON”T use Outlook or any other email app running directly from your own personal computer!

Why not? Personal computers are for personal emails. If you want to use emails for promotional marketing, you need to be able to track your readers, allow them to unsubscribe, and most importantly subscribe to your email database as well as send the email to a friend.

The best way to do all this is to choose a professional online email marketing solution.
Yes, there is a cost involved to do this, but we are talking as little as around $15 per month. If your email marketing campaign is good you will make this money back without a doubt.

Making sure you choose the right provider for your email marketing needs is a bigger decision than you might think, because if you find you are unhappy with the service once you have started growing your email marketing database it can be a huge setback to change over to another provider. You see, most professional email marketing systems will ensure that each person that subscribes has clicked and given permission to add them to your database list. If you then go and move to another provider, you will them need to ask each person to re-subscribe to your list, which usually leads to a 40% drop in your subscribers. This can take a long time to build up again, equating to the loss of a lot of revenue through email marketing campaigns.

So choose your email marketing provider wisely.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A GOOD EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

Firstly, you want a system that is easy to use.
Creating emails needs to be easy, sending and monitoring the success of the emails needs to be even easier.

SETTING UP TEMPLATES FOR YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Most good email marketing systems provide both these options, and even allow you to create your own Subscribe forms, response forms and auto reply email templates. Aweber allows all this, but even goes the next step and lets you set up timed auto response follow up emails, which is ideal for online marketing. Sending out additional emails for the following weeks can ensure a sale before they forget who you are.

EMAIL RESPONSE TRACKING

Tracking the response of each campaign can help you determine who is reading your emails, which products they clicked on in your email, who they forwarded the email to, and even how long and how many times they read it. This sort of marketing information is very important. My 3 favourite email marketing systems, Aweber, iContact and Constant Contact all provide these type of services, though I find Aweber the easiest to read. They provide simple graphs that you can review quickly.

iContact is a close second, though a big plus for iContact that Aweber is yet to develop is the free iContact iPhone App, which allows you to check your campaign success anytime, anywhere from your iphone! Brilliant for the busy marketer, especially when you are running multiple campaigns at the same time.

Constant Contact and MailChimp also offers iPhone Apps, though being a graphic/web designer I just tend to like the iContact App and website much better. It’s fresh, simple and both the website and iPhone App are easy to learn and use.

MANAGING AND IMPORTING CONTACTS

whatever system you use, make sure you have the ability to be able to easily add or download your mailing list database of clients. You don’t want to sign up and then find you have to individually add one person at a time! Make sure you can quickly and easily upload a CSV or EXCEL file so you can get started on your emailing success faster

SETTING UP FORMS ON YOUR WEBSITE

This is usually where the systems let me down the most…setting up a Subscribe form on your website.
Mailchimp seems a little awkward if you aren’t too web-savvy, and I haven’t had too much luck with getting the contact form layout just right when I have used Constant Contact.

Icontact and Aweber are both fairly straight forward and easy to do, even for a novice, allowing you to fully customize your Subscribe form as well as providing you some great templates to get you up and running quickly, though I did have a few issues with Aweber not totally liking the fact that I was doing it from a Mac, though it runs fine on a PC.

PRICING

The pricing to use an online email marketing package various a little from business to business. Most start at $15 a month for around 500 subscribers and then allow you to send 3000 emails a month. Aweber lets you sign up for the first month for just a single $1! So you get a good try out of their system and if you don’t like it you can change before you get too attached to it. Aweber works out a couple of dollars more expensive than some of the other leading packages such as iContact, but in the long run the tools they provide for professional email marketing will probably provide a higher return to your campaigns, which is why most email marketers usually choose Aweber.

But have a look at them all, try them all out for a test run and see what you think yourself before making a decision.

Article by Chris Bourke of Web SEO Coach and Devision Design Australia
Chris is a full time web designer and developer as well as an internet affiliate marketer.