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How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Solution
A Comparison Of The Top Three Email Marketing Solutions: AWeber, iContact, Constant Contact
Part One: Overview
An efficient email marketing solution will improve the service and ease of operability of your online business. It will make your life much easier. If you have ever tried to manage email lists of more than a few people, you know that it can steal much of your valuable time. An automated system will greatly reduce your headaches.
Many email marketing services exist. If you choose the wrong service initially, you will experience many problems down the road. How can you know which email marketing solution will best meet your needs?
In this series of five articles, we will answer that question. First, you will learn major pitfalls to avoid when choosing an email marketing solution. Second, you will find out the most important features of the services. Third, the three top performing email marketing services will be reviewed in detail. Finally, a head-to-head comparison of these three tools will help you make the right choice.
In part one, you will first learn about why free or do-it-yourself methods are a poor choice. You will then be taught what features are vital to help you avoid extra work. We will wrap this first part up with a brief overview of the three top email marketing solutions available.
Free Versus Paid Solutions
Why should you pay for an email marketing solution when you can find one for free or buy cheap software to do it yourself?
The FTC, as well as individual states, have passed comprehensive spam laws. They enacted these laws in response to unscrupulous marketers flooding everyone’s inboxes with deceitful and bogus offers. If you handle the technical side of your own email marketing, you need to keep up with the latest regulations.
You will avoid this hassle by using a reputable email marketing service. They will be completely responsible for understanding these regulations, and have developed methods to prevent you from making costly mistakes.
Free email marketing tools differ in many other ways. Scams plague the Internet. Everyone who surfs the Internet is skeptical of the many offers they encounter every day. Anyone can start a business on the Internet, and surfers know this.
If you use a free service, the providers of that service do try to profit. They make money by including ads in the emails they send out. When recipients opened their emails, they will be bombarded with these ads. This is very unprofessional and will reflect poorly upon your business.
What’s more, these free services have no reputation and no history. You work hard to build your email list. If your provider shuts down tomorrow, you will lose your entire list. That can spell disaster for your business.
Two more important considerations are covered in the next section. First, these free services are very unreliable, and many of your emails will not be delivered. Second, they don’t have the advanced tracking features you need to help you monitor your email campaigns.
Now you know the drawbacks of free email marketing services. Next, you will discover the most important features to look for when choosing a paid service.
Important Features
Some features of the three top email marketing solutions are nearly identical.
The cost of each of them is roughly the same. Basic e-mail management aspects are also similar. Each has ability for unlimited auto responders, multiple email lists, and unlimited messages.
Professional email marketing solutions can further be compared by examining four main categories of features:
- Deliverability
- Analytics and tracking
- Customer support
- Additional features
Deliverability-related features
Deliverability is the measure of the percentage of emails that are successfully sent. Deliverability assumes that all email addresses are valid. As previously noted, free e-mail marketing services will not successfully deliver a significant number of your emails. All three service–AWeber, iContact, and Constant Contact— claim to have 99% reliability.
Analytics and tracking
These features will help you understand how to run successful email campaigns. Professional tools will enable you to review your marketing efforts. With the help of these tools, you can view many different statistics related to your email campaigns.
For example, these reports can tell you click through rates of email links or how many people unsubscribed from your email list. You can pinpoint which emails produce your best results.
Customer support
When you have a technical problem or other questions, you want to know that you can find answers easily. Superior customer support results in quicker solutions to your problems. Customer support can also help you better understand certain aspects of email marketing. They can work with you to improve your success rate.
Customer support can be rated based upon a company’s ability to provide quick and accurate answers. It also benefits you for customer support to be available on weekends and late nights.
Additional features
AWeber, iContact, and Constant Contact each have unique features that will affect your experience when using its services. Many features focus on convenience and ease of use. Others improve your business’s professional appearance.
An improved interface is an example of ease-of-use. HTML email templates are examples of improving your business’ appearance.
The Top Three Email Marketing Services |
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Today’s top three email marketing services are AWeber, iContact, and Constant Contact. No other company comes close to the level of services they provide.
AWeber is the most established email marketing service. It was founded in 1998 and is the most recognized name of the three.
Constant Contact was founded in 1998 also. iContact was formed in 2004 and is a relative newcomer. These two companies have been quickly building their reputations as alternatives to AWeber.
In part two, we will discuss the benefits of AWeber in detail. This will be followed in part three by examining iContact. Constant Contact will be considered in part four. Part five will be a head-to-head comparison of these three solutions.
Continue on to Part Two: AWeber Review
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Nice review, of the marketing solutions you reviewed, I use Aweber, it’s good enough I suppose, besides many internet marketers use it, which is what drew me to it.