Ecommerce Marketing: How to Choose an Email Marketing Service

An email newsletter is an excellent ecommerce marketing tool. But at some point, your email marketing list will grow to the point where you can't manage it efficiently using an email program like Outlook. That's when it's time to look for a commercial email marketing service.

Commercial email marketing services not only maintain your lists and ensure that you comply with legal requirements, but they also provide a framework for creating and tracking the email newsletters you send. It's important you choose your email list manager well -- a poor choice can result in undelivered email and lost members if you have to change services in future.

In this article, I'll explain how to choose the right email list manager to help manage your ecommerce marketing campaigns.

The Basics: Email List-management Services

The basic email marketing services that list managers provide include adding new subscribers, removing subscribers who ask to be removed and deleting invalid or bounced emails. This is important for legal reasons, and it ensures your list is up-to-date and contains only valid email addresses so you aren't paying for services you aren't using. The service should also provide a sign-up process such as a customizable link that you can add to your website.

Most reputable services offer, if not insist upon, a double opt-in process where customers click to sign up for your list and then must reply to an email to confirm their subscription. These same services will encourage and enforce compliance with CAN-SPAM legislation and will work with ISPs to ensure emails from their servers aren't blocked as spam.

This is crucial -- you want your emails to be delivered, not blocked, and since emails are sent from the list manager's own servers, anyone abusing the service will negatively impact everyone else's email delivery rates.

When comparing service costs, be aware that some companies charge for the number of emails you send each month and others by the number of list subscribers. Also look for hidden additional costs -- some charge for storing images online while others charge for extras such as surveys and newsletter archiving. Make sure that you allow room for your list to grow -- consider not only the cost of servicing your current list but also what will happen if your list doubles or quadruples in size.

Good list-management services provide tools for creating email newsletters. Many provide templates, some of them customizable, that you can use, and some will create personalized templates for a reasonable price. At the very least, you'll want a range of templates to choose from and an easy-to-use interface for creating your email newsletters -- preferably with a WYSIWYG interface that doesn't require you to write html code.

Some services offer the option of lists members receiving emails as html or text format. This gives your list members a choice as to which to subscribe to, but you'll have an additional overhead as you'll need to check both text and html versions before sending them.

Additional Email List-Management Features

Beyond the basics, services will provide features that might be on your "must-have" list. Some services, for example, make it easy to manage multiple lists. This lets you send a single message to all your list members, and the duplicates will be removed so a person appearing in multiple lists will only get one copy of the message.

If you have a large list, sampling may be a useful feature. Some services let you create a sample list to send a test message or to allow you to compare results from two different sample mailings. By sending a test email to a small portion of your list, you can gauge the response before sending it to the entire list.

To assess the responses to your emails, your service should provide usable tracking information. You'll want statistics on total delivered and bounced emails, opening rates and click-through rates for each of the links within the email so you can compare results.

Integration with social networking sites is an additional option some services provide. These offer Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook integration allowing you to post messages when a newsletter is sent out, for example.

Still other services will provide mobile apps for the iPhone or for Droid phones, which allow you to create newsletters from your phone rather than requiring access to a computer.

Technical Help and Data Security

Your list management service should store your email marketing information in a secure way. This is information your customers have given you, so it must be adequately protected from hackers and regularly backed up so you won't lose the data if the service's computers fail.

If you need technical help, you should be able to get it 24/7 and in a way that's easily accessible to you. While FAQs are a handy source of general information and forums are good for interacting with other users, they aren't a replacement for a live support person when you're stuck with a technical issue and an email newsletter due out in the morning.

How to Get Started with a List Management Service

If you already have an email list, check to see if the new service can import your existing list as-is, or if existing participants need to verify their list membership. If verification is required, your existing list participants may need to re-sign up for your list -- a requirement that will no doubt cause you to lose a significant proportion of your list participants.

Check out the list services for ease of use and help with getting started. Do the sites have user resources, tutorials, videos and start-up guides to help you not only build your list but also to create and manage your email marketing campaigns? Some services offer online webinars, some offer face-to-face seminars and others provide one-to-one support to help you get started and to help you maximize your marketing efforts.

There are plenty of great email list managers in the small business solutions arena. Your task will be to find the one that best matches your needs. If you're in the market for an email list manager, make a checklist of the features your service needs to provide, and then search out those that match your list at an affordable price.

Examples of Email Marketing ServicesConstant ContactCampaignerEmmaMailChimpVertical ResponseTopica

Helen Bradley is a respected international journalist writing regularly for small business and computer publications in the USA, Canada, South Africa, UK and Australia. You can learn more about her at her Web site, HelenBradley.com

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