Choosing an Email Campaign Service: E-Campaign Tips Series

We frequently field questions from clients related to email campaigns. What makes a good subject line? How do you get readers to click-through? There's a lot of factors that go into a successful email campaign so we're breaking our tips up into a series of posts to share some of our expertise.

Before you can consider content details about your email campaigns or e-newsletters, you must first consider the service through which you'll distribute. There are important elements to consider when choosing an email campaign service.

Cost Effectiveness

Compared to traditional snail mail print campaigns, e-campaigns can save a lot of cash. There's no printing costs and it's a lot cheaper than a stamp per recipient. Still, research your campaign service's billing. Is there a flat fee? How much do they charge per recipient? You should be able to get a clear idea as to how much getting your message out there is going to cost you well ahead of time.

Easy to Manage

You'll spend a lot of time deciding on the content to put in your email, so you probably don't want to spend a lot of time compiling the list of people you're sending it to. A good e-campaign service will provide an automated process for readers to subscribe so you don't end up copy and pasting emails from your address book. To avoid possibly annoying customers that may not want your campaign in their inbox, a good service should be end-user friendly enough that it also makes un-subscribing a breeze.

Measurable

After all the effort of putting together a campaign, you want to be able to judge your success. Paying close attention to the tracking statistics and reports provided by your service post-send out can go a long way towards showing who's eye you're catching, who you're getting clicks from, and who marks you as spam. Statistic reports can let you know what worked and what you need to change to increase the effectiveness of your next campaign. The real-time confirmation of how many people you've reached is a great confidence builder, as well.

Digett has helped clients run successful campaigns using MailBuild and Campaign Monitor, if you want to check those out. And stay on the look out for more e-campaign tips.