Stay in contact. Don't Spam. How? Carefully. Choose the right technology to suit your email marketing needs and employ a strategy based on results. There are many established email marketing platforms to choose from with advantages and pitfalls. Does you email communications system track bounce rates, read rates, click throughs? Can you email broadcast system clean your list of bogus email addresses? What happens if you are reported as a spammer?

High volume email campaigns require unique solutions, as many off-the-shelf email marketing tools are priced for small organizations and become costly with large email campaigns. Larger organizations can afford systems that are integrated with existing email and contact management infrastructure and stand to benefit from the connectivity. The email marketing approach you choose has the potential to result directly in increased revenue, but can also be ineffective, costly, and annoyance to your customers if done poorly.

Constant Contact

February 17, 2008

Many companies are using Constant Contact to manage their small to medium size email lists and broadcast communications. Constant Contact provides some useful tool and favorable pricing for small scale email marketing, with the ability to organize contacts by categories, create multiple customized email templates, and track reads and click-through rates. Larger lists become cost prohibitive and are better serviced by other options.

One client recently discovered that Constant Contact's policy regarding spam is very aggressive and possibly unreasonable as they discontinued his service after less than 0.5 percent of his recipients flagged his initial correspondence as spam using Google Mail's "Report Spam" button. His email list was gathering directly from his e-commerce platform based on an opt-in checkbox on the payment page and had the standard opt-out link at the bottom of the text. The client ending up switching to a vendor that provided a more forgiving policy regarding occasion spam reports.

Constant Contact