We often get this question in our webinars and from clients:
Why can't I send e-newsletters from my regular email address?
If you're broadcasting your e-newsletters through a simple email address you're decreasing the effectiveness of your newsletter campaign. Here are 6 reasons an E-newsletter service is more effective than your email client:
- Regular email sent to a large group of people can and will be targeted as spam and may not reach your whole audience. E-newsletter services have mechanisms in place to make sure your newsletter gets to your audience.
- E-newsletter services have tracking tools to allow you to see who opens your newsletter and how they respond to it. Do they click the links? Do they forward it to their friends? This information is key if you want to learn how your audience behaves and what content excites them the most.
- E-newsletter services offer you opportunities to customize your email to match your current website and branding. A good E-newsletter service gives you a bunch of newsletter templates to choose from and the ability to edit them to match your branding. The best services allow you to edit your template and your newsletters in both HTML and with a WYSIWYG editor.
- E-newsletter services can provide archiving opportunities that make your newsletter more searchable on the web. Check out iContact's archiving capabilities.
- E-newsletter services integrate your e-newsletter seamlessly into your web site. The best e-newsletter services have e-newsletter signups that do not take them off your your website. All sign up details live on your website. (Constant Contact forces you to go to their site, which is confusing - iContact's integrated sign up form is better)
- E-newsletter services help you gather more data about your members. some services allow you to also set up surveys for your list members.
- E-newsletter services manage your contact list. Members can simply subscribe or unsubscribe without any additional work on your end.
You may have noticed that we have a special love for
iContact . They are our preferred e-newsletter solution. Stay tuned for our next post Why We Love iContact.
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By now most people have heard of blogs, and many people are convinced that blogging will help them bring in more business, gain more traffic and increase their credibility. But even when people are convinced as to the "why blog"question, we still get a lot of questions from clients about "how to blog"--not onlyt how to get started but how to improve what they're doing once they've been doing it awhile.
So we've been collecting a treasure trove of resources around blogging, from intros for newbies to places that consistently offer up good, meaty information and resources for bloggers everywhere. Here are an admittedly idiosyncratic sampling of some of our favorite resources--feel free to drop any additional ideas in the comments and if we like them we'll edit this post to include them:
The Wordpress tutorial. Information from blog software leaders.
The BlogBasics Tutorial. As the name indicates, this web site specializes in information for the blogging newbie.
Speaking of education and social media, I thought I'd go even more basic than Joshua did in his last post on social media marketing and back us up a step, because I realize that some folks still have a nervous "um, what?" reaction to the words "social media" or "social networks". Nervous because even though they've heard the terms, or know that they're maybe vaguely associated with things like Facebook or YouTube or even Twitter, they're just not sure what those things are--and more importantly why they should care.
So in my own admittedly scattered and idiosyncratic browsing around blogs I like (hi, I'm talking to you today, Eric Karjaluoto!) I found this great white paper from the guys at smashLAB. It's a social media primer, and it explains pretty succinctly what social media are and why you should care. It's got some good examples of how companies are using social media (both in good ways and bad ways) and what positive opportunities exist for companies willing to make their own forays into the world of social media. I found it to be nicely written for those who are at that nervous, afraid-to-admit-you're-not-totally-sure-what-your-web-people-are-talking-about stage of familiarity with social media. Check it out and let us know what you think.
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