Email marketing - it really works!

I've been talking about my experiences with email marketing, after my wife who works for Constant Contact persuaded me to give it a go. The main effort I have been putting into it is providing subscribers of my newsletter (mostly Consected customers) with valuable information that they want to receive in their inbox, not just another spammy sales effort. Well, it has finally come together. I sent out my first newsletter to a test group of 99 email addresses on Tuesday. Why 99? Well the free-trial from Constant Contact limits you to a small list of contacts initially. But this set was plenty for me to start to see the response. And I can say that based on this I have already signed up for the real service! That represents a high recommendation for the service, trust me.

Following some advice from the expert on communications, my wife, to go with a single topic for the newsletter, I managed to pull together some pretty good content. It followed my current area of interest, barcodes, and how they can help business organize information better. For those of you interested in seeing the newsletter, and the demo it contains, take a look at the archived copy: Can you improve your business with hundreds of little dots?

What kind of feedback did I get? Well, the Constant Contact reports are nice. They report email opens, link click-through, and other useful stuff. I signed up because I was amazed to see that the email was opened by more than 30% of recipients on the list. That means that 30 people at least opened the email to see what it was talking about, rather than just hitting delete. A couple registered 'do no mail', which is good to know. But frankly I messed up on the click tracking, as I disabled it in a few important links, so the Constant Contact reports don't give me that information and I have to hunt around elsewhere for it. And quite honestly, my cheapie website host kept putting my shared server offline the day the email went out, so many people wouldn't have got to the website anyway. I see a move to the Consected production Rackspace servers in my crystal ball.

But I went one better than the great open rate. After seeing the newsletter, a business partner I hadn't spoken to in months contacted me -- with a great new business opportunity! That will be worth the effort and monthly subscription fee without doubt!

I'm going to follow the same format for my next newsletter, in early March. If I get the same rate of response I'll be stunned (and happy)!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Email marketing - sending my first newsletter to myself

My trial of email marketing from Constant Contact continues after a short delay. Last step was to chat to an email marketing consultant, who provided me with a lot of information to get me started. The next step was to try and put together my first email, and send it to the enormous mailing list of one person, me! I did start to read some of additional resources that I was sent as well, but frankly I'm more in a "get on and do it" mood, so I'll be making a lot of mistakes along the way. 

To get started you have to pick a template for your email from all the categories presented. It feels like hundreds, so you'd think there would be one that jumped out at me. But this turned out harder than I expected. In the end I rejected the typical "business people around a PC" styles, opting for something more bright and friendly. Hey, I don't have to get it right first time, and hopefully nobody is judging Consected services on my aesthetic tastes. Just as long as the template is not clearly obnoxious or pink and flowery I think I'm okay.

So, a green template picked, now its time to start editing. For users of the Google Chrome browser, you'll get a warning that the editor is a Beta version currently. Which means presumably that the engineers haven't really had a chance to validate that everything works correctly, although for me it seemed to work alright (better than the editor I'm using to write this blog to be honest). 

To make it obvious that it is a newsletter you are writing, the editor is split into the major blocks of the page:

• Title
• Table of contents
• Greetings
• Articles
• etc, etc...

You get to edit each block independently of the others, which prevents you from completely screwing up the layout of the email if you delete something incorrectly. It also really helps to guide your thought processes, rather than starting from a blank page. 

One gripe is around the simple image upload facility, which worked fine generally. Although I'll say that is seems kinda backwards to have to resize your images where you upload them into the library, rather than where they appear in the text. Maybe I'm missing something, but even this Google Blogger editor manages to be a little more intuitive in that regard.

Now, the big challenge. Something that no service can help you with really. What on earth do I write about? So my current areas of interest are barcodes for information management and marketing, and travel expenses. Woohoo! This is going to be exciting fodder. So let's get creative.

So I start writing, and find that the conveniently small article blocks that you start with really help you keep your thoughts concise and to the point. I want to capture people's interest in the email, not write War and Peace. So that part of it is easier than I expected. But I want each teaser article to lead to more useful information, on my blog or website. But I don't want this to just look like an obnoxious ploy to get people to my website to sell them something. This is about engagement, after all. So the hard part I realized is having some content already published somewhere that I can point reader of my newsletter to. The really valuable stuff that the newsletter teaser leads to.

Well, that's where I've got myself stuck. So I sent the test email anyway, just for the hell of it. And it looked pretty good, I must say! But I now need to put some thought behind what is going behind the scenes. Writing good content, that I really want to publish on my website takes a little time. This blog, well you can already see that this is a different story. But it would be nice for people to get something useful from the website. So it seems I have another item for the to-do list. Which gives me a perfect opportunity to sign off until the next installment of my email marketing story.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Email marketing for small businesses - the trial continues

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I chatted about my quest to try out email marketing for the first time. Not spam, but the idea of sending really engaging to contacts and customers about not only my products, but many things that may interest them and their businesses.

Here we are almost half way through the first week and I need to give a little more feedback. Constant Contact throws more ideas, information and educational materials at you than you can possibly consume. This is a good thing, since they lay it out in a way that allows you to understand what you can do with the service, so you can pick the way that you absorb information best. Want to just play? Your email marketing service is there, and a quick document walks you through how you can send a test email to see it in action. Want to read some more about the concepts? Pick from a range of relevant information. Want to see an online walk-through? 2pm ET will get you that (plus some other options I don't remember). Just need a little personal Q&A? Well, my friendly Constant Contact Consultant, Jon, can help me with that. I might need him to guide me a little when it comes to our next check in at the end of the week. He knows my aims and what my company offers, and I'm sure he'll have his notes in front of him when we chat next.

So far, I have to say that I'm impressed with the amount of information available, and the non-pushy service that I've been receiving. Remember, this is all part of my 60-day free trial. I'm not paying for all this yet. Obviously, its all part of a cunning sales-ploy, but who cares when you get this type of service?!

Check in tomorrow to see what progress I'm making. Later in the process, I might even sign up for a competitive service or two, just to see which one really works for me.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com