Email Marketing tools who do you use?

If you have read my email list building post I am sure you are wondering what tools we use. When it comes to professional email marketing using outlook or some dodgy mailer is not the key. It gets easily blocked by spam guards and there is no reporting. When you are getting serious I recommend using a professional mailing program. Freestyle Media have used a lot of different providers over the time although we have settled with Campaign Master for our corporate clients. They are a little bit more expensive as compared to the others (1 or 2 cents per email) although they are well worth it when it comes to reliably delvering mail to your customers.

Here are the 4 things to look for when choosing your email marketing provider:

1. Deliverability – Campaign master have a team of whitelist experts brokering deals for your emails with ISP’s to ensure that they don’t get blocked by SPAM guards. A lot of email marketing providers have a certain deliverability rate but don’t have a team of people who ensure that the ISP’s accept your emails. This is the main reason why I choose Campaign Master
2. Ease of use – If the program isn’t easy to use don’t bother. I have heard of some of our clients spending over 4 hours on a mailout because the system was so cumbersome.
3. Reporting – I like graphs and click through numbers. I know you can do lots of fancy analysis but I just prefer getting an indication of whats happening not so much a definitive answer. I just don’t think you can expect a single emailout to tell you everything there is to know about your customers. It takes time you need to learn from each activity 1 small thing and slowly build the knowledge up until, like Michael Kiely says, you can walk into a crowd of people and you can walk up and talk to the people who are your customer.
4. Cost – When it comes to cost I think about what and how many I am delivering and choose a provider to match. If you are just sending a text email go the cheapest you can get, but if you are sending an HTML (multipart – text and HTML wrapped together which “degrades gracefully” depending on the email viewing software the user has) I would use a more sophisticated program like Campaign Master.

Let me know what is important to you with your email marketing?