Email Marketing Software: What you’ll want and who can give it to you

Have you ever experienced “too much of a good thing”?

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to choose between two or three things, knowing that one of each has the capacity to make things better?

I have (It’s hard to choose between Black Forest and Chocolate Mousse).

In today’s email marketing industry there’s a whole slew of tools to choose from, making it tough to figure out which one gets you the most bang for your buck.

Even veteran web entrepreneurs who’ve had experience with email marketing find it tough to tell which products are worth it and which ones aren’t. I’ve seen a lot of people get lured into making purchases that they later regret for one reason or another.

Whether you’re a starter or a seasoned pro, there are a few things to consider when looking for the perfect email marketing software.

Does it Have The Right Stuff? I know, I know — elementary, dear Jenkins. It’s pretty obvious — but read on. Macduff, because I might drop a few pointers that you’ve forgotten with time.

Email Marketing software generally differ on three areas: user interface, system compatibility and the actual creation of the email you’ll be blasting.

User Interface – Back in the Internet Stone Age (early 90′s), sending out an email was a major pain in the bee-hind. Email UIs were text-based, meaning you had to know a fair amount of programming to send out a haiku poem to an officemate.

When it was that tough, I just resorted to writing them down and distributing them to every desk in the office.

It would take a few more years before the greater public would be treated to GUI-driven email clients like Outlook Express and Eudora. Today, all you need is to type in a message, click the send button and poof! You’ve sent out obscene pictures to a distant lover.

I kid, I kid!

The evolution of emailing is like that of video games. Back then, both were just for the neurotically geeky. Now, everyone’s in on the fun. All good though, user interfaces were made to prolmote ease of navigation and the enhancement of key functions.

Most email marketing software today make designing good UIs a prime consideration. Developers have realized over the years that a good user experience with their tools results in marketing success and customer loyalty in the long run.

Email Marketing Director 3.1, for instance, divides the entire campaign into three steps – creating a contact list, creating your message and, lastly, choosing a way to send your message. It streamlines the process, allowing newcomers to the email marketing gig to jump right in and start firing away.

Simplicity in the UI is good because an application with too many buttons can cause confusion.  For Internet marketers who want to keep things easy and familiar, Group Mail 5 is a great choice. It has a button scheme that has a similar look to the traditinal Windows interface, making its operation second nature to most people.

Email Job Scheduling is a feature that allows Internet marketers to schedule sending dates. That’s right, folks — autoresponders allow you to chill as you watch your business take flight.

iContact is an email marketing service that lets you dictate when an email should be sent out. Just specify a number of days and it’ll send out that email depending on a contact’s subscription date.

This translates into less time fussing over your list and more time chilling out with and enjoying some mojitos.

Compatibility. Just like any other software, email marketing apps need to be easily installed and shouldn’t encounter errors as much as possible.

SendBlaster 2 is compatible with almost any Windows OS and it has an awesome Mac version. It has great functionality and doesn’t require unnecessary steps to get things moving. If you dig hassle-free setups, this one just might be what you’re looking for.

Then there’s that common SMTP vs DNS issues that plague email marketers. SMTP, as you know, means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It’s basically that protocol that’s used to send messages from one server to another.

In such a case, you still need to configure your POP/IMAP Server and the SMTP server for things to work out. Atomic Mail Sender automatically detects your SMTP settings for you. From there, you can start sending out those emails with no worries. Pretty bad-ass.

Some Email Marketing Software support only SMTP. Others, like HandyMailer supports both SMTP and DNS. All you need to do is choose which one to use and a wizard will help you in set it all up. EPIC.

Email Creation and Templates. The design you use when creating an email for your list is always a huge factor in your success. Remember, this email is what you use to create relationships with your customers. It’s where you should place most of your creativity and powers of intuition if you want to make it big in the online market.

It’s like sending your loved one an awesome Happy Birthday card, or your old buddies a cool post card.

It’s also cool to have a Wizard that helps with almost any task that needs to be done, and for budding Internet entrepreneurs, a tutorial is one step on the road towards the mastery of the Interweb arts.

Most email marketing software have video tutorials over at YouTube to make learning easy for users. However, tools like e-Campaign, Worldcast and Email Marketing Director not only have videos in the Youtube cloud, they also have great documentation, wizards and support to guide you through your email campaigns.

Templates make life a lot simpler, both for internet marketers and for the users. For one, it makes a message bearable to read and it takes the burden of HTML Email creation away.

You see, one of the biggest obstacles programmers have when creating HTML emails is that they’re going to have problems with web-based programs.

With so many browsers and applications that could view emails today, it’s a challenge to have your HTML email open up without encountering a problem with at least one browser or email client. Programmers used to find it difficult to overcome these problems but that issue has been addressed to a nice degree over the years.

With templates, you’re provided with a set of HTML email formats that are application-ready most of the time.

SendBlaster, Group Mail and Email Marketing Director are among the most popular email marketing software with the ability to integrate email templates in your campaign.

Sometimes, mp3s and other sound files can be attached to email. Few have this capability though, like Handymailer and e-Campaign.

The Numbers. I’ve stressed in the previous posts how important it is to GEEK out with Analytics and Tracking data. These numbers are 1) proof of your efforts, 2) a basis with which you can judge what works, what doesn’t and how it could get better.

With email tracking, you can find out how much of your email reaches its supposed recipients, how many of your contacts have unsubscribed from your list and how much of your emails have actually been opened.

From there you could make appropriate adjustments to your campaign.

Email Tracking Add-ons tell which email messages have been sent successfully, and if there was a possibility of errors, they’d list which ones have been encountered.

Most of the applications I’ve mentioned above have email tracking reporting features.

ReadNotify, is an email tracking service that lets you know whether an email message has been opened or not. It generally uses PGP signatures to monitor the opening of emails.

It comes in the forms of plugins, so you could integrate it with both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail in your Internet Explorer browser.

iContact has an excellent tracking interface. You can monitor recipients, views, clicks and even complaints made by contacts about your messages being spam.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve discussed earlier:

Good email marketing software is composed of three things:

1)      User interface

2)      System compatibility

3)      the actual creation of the email

If you want a mix of all three, you should definitely get Aweber. With a high delivery rate, an easy-to-learn UI and good street cred, Aweber is one of the most popular email marketing software out there.

One good feature that Aweber has is that it can tell you if a user unsubscribes from your list and the reason behind it. Thus making you more aware of how your messages perform and what you can do to make them better.

I wouldn’t complain about the main issue though.

There’s a good side to having so many choices, and that is the fact that YOU will always have something up there for you..

No matter how hard (or easy) it is to find.

Andy “Mr. Mailman” Jenkins

P.S. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Notice the Facebook comment feature? I know what you’re thinking. NICE.

Tagged as: Andy Jenkins, aweber, email marketing, email marketing director, email marketing software, icontact, sendblaster