Tuesday, March 23, 2010

8 Reasons to Create an e-Newsletter with Constant Contact

Want to incorporate a very inexpensive tool into the arsenal of your internet marketing budget? Having an e-Newsletter is an excellent way to market your business. There are a lot of programs you can use, but in this post we're going to talk about Constant Contact.

Here are some great reasons why you should consider Constant Contact for your email newsletter.

1. You can try it free for 60 days

This is obviously one great reason, and if you're even remotely considering using an email newsletter, this should be enough to convince you to try it out. 60 days gives you enough time to get the feel for the program and see if you like it.

2. It brings more traffic to your website

Trying to promote a new product or service on your website? An email newsletter is a great way to advertise it. In our newsletter we like to link users to our business workshops and articles pages to keep them informed on what's new. It can also be a good reminder to your customers about your services. It's possible that someone was planning on visiting your website to find information on purchasing something or hiring you for more work, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. A friendly little newsletter with great information and links to your website will just give them a very subtle reminder that you're still there.

2. Easy to use templates

Whether you're an HTML wizard or new to the whole computer thing, it's easy to create a nice looking email in Constant Contact. You can also add pictures and links very easily. It takes an hour or two to get your email campaign set up initially, but once you have everything in place it only takes a few minutes to send out the next batch of emails.

3. Good technical support

We found that the technical support from Constant Contact was very good. This is probably the biggest benefit of using Constant Contact over other service providers. We also received a friendly sales call after we signed up to see if we had any questions.

4. Statistics

This is my favorite reason. It's fun to see when people open your newsletter, and what links they click on. Gives you a really good indication of what works and what doesn't. You can also see what emails bounced back, got spammed, forwarded, and who opted-out.

5. It saves lots of time

How does it save time you ask? By managing your contact list for you. Just add the new emails to the database and Constant Contact will take care of the rest. When you want to send out a newsletter, it will sent it to everyone in your list. It even personalizes it by putting the recipients name at the top of the email, which also helps keep the email from being sent to spam.

6. Users can easily opt in and out

It's important to have good email newsletter etiquette. If someone decides they don't want your emails anymore, they should easily be able to opt out. Constant Contact adds a link at the bottom of every email to easily do just that.

It's also just as easy to opt in. You are provided with a piece of code that you can put on your blog or website so that people can easily sign up to receive your newsletter. Speaking of which...if you want to receive our email newsletter you can do so on our sign up page.

7. Emails won't get sent to spam as much

If you sent out mass emails through a regular email account like Gmail or Yahoo!, it's more likely to get sent to the spam folder. Long story short - with a program like Constant Contact it's much less likely to happen. Plus if it does happen on the rare occasion, you will know it and you can ask whoever didn't get your email to add your email address to their recipients list.

8. It's not expensive

After the 60 days you have to pay, sadly. But it's $15 a month to start out with, which is a pretty low price considering how helpful it can be in drawing traffic to your website.




We highly recommend sending email newsletters to clients, and Constant Contact is a good way to do it. Also as a side note, there are plenty of really good other programs out there to choose from. Here is a very helpful blog post that compares some of the more popular ones, including MailChimp which is free if you have a small contact list (less than 500).

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