E-Mail Marketing Solutions

When it comes to keeping in contact with your clients and customers it is easy to get bombarded with the sheer volume of options available.  In this article we are going to break down a few options and some of the pros of them and how they may be beneficial to your business. 

Before we get into that, ever heard of the CAN-SPAM Act? It’s an ordinance that helps govern how email marketing messages can be composed. By following the guidelines it will help ensure your email gets to your customers and does not get rejected by the incoming mail server your customers are one. For more information you can see all the guidelines here. 

The first solution on our list is also the oldest. Mail Chimp has been around for about 20 years and has grown to offer many more services. They obviously have done something very right to be around this long. Mail Chimp has many templates to use to help the new e-mail marketing profressional, an intersting resource section that can give guidence, and a wide varety of pricing options. They do have a FREE option that includes some basic templates, and allows up to 2,000 contacts. Every piece that goes out will be have Mail Chimp’s branding on it at this level. The firs tlevel up is $9.99 a month and is a worthwhile investment if this is the platform you choose.

Our Second pick to feature is HubSpot. As opposed to a traditional simple contact solution, HubSpot offers a free CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). Sure they have premium version as well, that should not discount how well rounded of a solution their Free CRM is. HubSpots tool can connect with gmail, G-Suite and most types of Outlook. It has forms, email marketing, tasks, deals, ticketing, live chat and so much more. If there was a critique to be made, it would be there are too many options, and that can become over whelming for someone who is looking just for a simple solution to email their clients. The next level up is $49.99 a month and should all these bells and whistles (and more) be of interest, then by all means HubSpot is the platform for you.

Third up to the plate we bring you EmailOctopus. Probably one of the newer services out there, EmailOctopus helps bring costs down and offers great, simple, straight forward email sending and tracking. How they do this is by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS). You will create a free Amazon SES account and through the power of Amazon it’ll help you send quick and efficient emails. EmailOctopus service can connect to WooCommerce, OptIn Monster, Shopify, Salesforce, Eventbrite and a host of other services through Zapier. They have a free solution that starts with 2,500 contacts and 10,000 emails a month. After that the service jumps to $20 a month for the lowest teir on it’s pro platform. 

The final tool we will cover today is Newsletters by Tribulent Software. Unlike the other options mentioned on this list, Newsletters is a premium WordPress plugin. If your web site is running on WordPress this may be the solution for you. It can do most of the core features of all of the above services, it can send, has templates, track, and more! One of our favorite features of this tool is it can turn any Page or Post on your web site into a newsletter with a couple clicks. It uses your own mail servers to send it out, so making sure that you obey the CAN-SPAM Act is doubly important here. Being as it is a premium plugin there are no free variations of it, there is a one time cost of $65 for a single web site. If you have Imaginary Friends develope your web site there is a good chance this was included at no additional charge!

There are many, many, MANY more tools available out there to do similiar jobs to these. We just took a sampling that would give the largest range of features and cost to show case. Should you want any assistance to help set these up for your company  or have any further questions please feel free to reacout out to your Imaginary Friends and Start a Project. We look forward to talking with you soon!