Email Success:
Positive Email Branding

We don't pretend to have all the answers about how to keep in contact with your clients and customers via email, the situation is very fluid in 2006 and 2007. While email newsletters are an excellent means of communication, one should not underestimate the effort required to maintain a mailing list of more than a couple hundred names.

If you manage an association, then you already know that keeping in contact with your members is becoming a harder and harder job with spam filters and over-zealous ISP's often eating up important communications.

We do know of several excellent solution providers with services tailored to business professionals, associations and small businesses. One of these, Constant Contact, you can try out for free. Other providers that come to mind are White Hat and Sparklist. We focus on Constant Contact because we believe the user interface is the easiest of the lot to learn.

Here is some information about Constant Contact services -- Even if you send out 40,000 emails in a month to various segments of your mailing list, your cost is only $50 for a list of 5,000 or less. Yes, there is a not-for-profit discount available.

Need to set up a list so that people can choose either html or text based emails? Not a problem. Need to have good looking format? There are dozens of attractive templates available and you can have a template designed especially for your organization.

Why Constant Contact? The reasons are many, here are a few:

1. It's self administrating - Prospects, clients, members sign up for various lists themselves and can unsubscribe themselves as well. This greatly reduces overhead.
   
2. Tracking of email campaigns - This includes bounces, tracking of emails opened, reporting of clicks on links to your web pages, etc. Right now you're probably working in the dark, not knowing if any of your email marketing is effective. With the Constant Contact system, you know how much of your email gets opened and bounces are recorded and listed in Constant Contact without coming back to haunt you. (You already have enough to do dealing with spam so handling of bounces in addition is something you don't need.)
   
3. Constant Contact clout! - Their business partners are some of the biggest names in the industry which makes it easier for you to deal with potential mail blocking problems from the largest ISP's such as AOL and Earthlink.

Give them a try, remember the first 50 names on your list are free, even if you mail them every day of the month.