If you’re new to using email marketing to promote your business online, you may have noticed that there are a lot of email marketing providers out there. An email marketing provider is the company who sends out your business’s emails to your list. When your business decides to use email marketing as a method of online promotion, the process of email marketing usually involves:
- Signing up with an email marketing provider (company)
- Building a list of names and email addresses to market to (this can be done via sign up boxes on your website and other methods)
- Once you have enough people to market to, you then create an email that you want to send to your list
- The email marketing provider will then send the email to your list
- Once your email is sent, the email marketing provider will keep track of statistics on how many people your emails are reaching, if the emails are being reported as spam and other information that’s going to be helpful towards your campaign
If you decide to integrate email marketing into your online business promotion plans, the first step is going to be picking the right email provider. But how do you know what email marketing provider is right for you?
Not every email marketing provider or service is going to be right for everyone. No two businesses or online marketing plans are alike and therefore, you need to make sure that you’re choosing a company that will meet your needs. Here’s a short list of questions to ask yourself when you’re searching for the right email marketing provider:
- What is my monthly or yearly budget? There are emailing marketing services that can be acquired for free, while other companies charge a lot of money.
- How many emails are you expected to send out per month? This is important because a lot of companies structure their pricing plans (or their free service) around the number of emails you’re going to be sending. If you know that you’d like to send one every single week of the year and you need a free account, you’d need to check the restrictions on the number of emails to make sure you can meet your goals.
- How many people are you planning to accumulate on your list? Once again, some companies only allow you a certain number of people on your list depending on your pricing plan (or free plan).
- Are you going to want to send plain text emails or html emails with pictures and graphics? Depending on the plan, some service providers restrict what types of emails you can send.
- Finally, what sort of tools are you getting for the service that you’d be paying for (or for a free account?) Do you get to build the forms that you may want to use on your website to get people to sign up for your list? Or do you need to hire someone to develop them for you? Another consideration is mobile- do you get an app to manage your email marketing account while you’re on the go?
The questions above are just a few of the things that you may want to take into consideration when you need to pick your email marketing provider. It all comes down to simple research. Making sure you have the right company to start with will help prevent frustrations later down the road.
