While a lot of my recent blog posts have been all about communicating with your audience through social media platforms, there is another means of brand communications sometimes overlooked: Email.
I’m not discounting solid use of social media here at all. But email marketing can also do wonders for your small business or nonprofit. Like social media, email marketing can engage your audience, share your personality, and build loyalty.
I’ve previously used email marketing for a grant-giving charity to share our funding announcements. In real time, I saw the open rates and what links in the email were clicked, or if anyone forwarded the email to share it with someone else. It was fantastic to be able to see these types of interactions without the guessing game of “Did people really read this email about our new grant cycle opening?”
Email marketing can be beneficial to a small business too! Send a thank you to your customer for his purchase or send details on how your customer can maximize his recent buy. Or celebrate a customer’s birthday by sending her a coupon. Each of these acts of engagement will boost customer loyalty if used appropriately. The idea is not to send too many emails, but also sending just enough that your customers will think of you for their next purchase.
When it comes to email marketing services, the two top competitors are currently MailChimp and Constant Contact. Here are some quick positives and negatives of these frontrunners:
MailChimp
Positives
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It’s 100% free as long as you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers to your account. You can send up to 12,000 emails each month without paying a penny. Many small businesses and nonprofits will their find email marketing needs fall well within these limits - yielding no cost!
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MailChimp is the cheaper option if you have a small list, but does charge for some extra features like being able to remove the MailChimp badge from footers, enable autoresponders, deliver by time zone, and view spam filter diagnostics. Extra features start at $10/month for 0-500 subscribers.
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It’s easy to integrate within your website to push newsletter sign ups and it provides an excellent user experience for email content creators and editors.
Negatives
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Customer support isn’t so visible. It isn’t impossible to be in touch with them, but they make it pretty obvious they want you to be able to sort your problem out with the information they already offer on the site.
Constant Contact
Positives
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A phone number is readily available along with a giant picture of a “Constant Contact coach.” It becomes clear that prepared assistance is a phone call away.
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60 day free trial offer
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Offers multi-level pricing packages including standard pricing, prepay pricing & nonprofit prepay pricing.
Negatives
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It’s not the cheapest option out there. While MailChimp offers up to 2,000 subscribers for free, Constant Contact begins charging plans for 0-500 subscribers at $15/month.
As the two top email marketing companies in the industry, it’d be hard to go wrong with either, but when you’ve hired someone to do your web marketing for you - MailChimp might be your best bet. With MailChimp developers can actually create templates that meet your needs in a way that sticking to Constant Contact’s drag and drop templates can’t.
“MailChimp is just the best combination of developer experience and user experience of all the products that I’ve used. It’s easy and efficient for us to build great looking templates that are rock solid, and it’s easy for end users to work with those templates” says our very own Matt Moen here at Kilpatrick Design.
But they’re both free to start — so if you’re interested in email marketing, you can sign up, test it out for yourself, and play around with some templates and features fairly quickly at zero cost. Worth it, don’t you think?