For a successful online business you will need to utilize some form of email marketing. The days of sending out flyers in the mail and cold calling on the phone are dying. The new technology of email is where most online businesses advertise and where they receive most of their business from.
Email software can save you hours of time and much frustration, but which one should you choose?
There are free and fee based email marketing software to choose from. Many people believe that the free ones will offer them the same benefits as the fee based. Just because it may look to be the same program it usually is not. Make sure you check the features of many different email marketing software programs before making a bad decision.
There are many software programs that will offer a free trial so you can explore all the included features before making your purchase.
The most important features you should look for in your email marketing software are:
? Personalized or Cold: Make sure that you are able to personalize the emails. A cold email will get you no attention and usually end up in the spam box of the recipient. There are group mail options that will still allow you to personalize your emails individually.
? Monitoring: You should be able to get reports on the open rates, click thru rates, as well as deliverability statistics. You will want to keep track of how successful your email marketing campaigns are.
? Size Capabilities: How many emails can the software send at one time? If you only need 1000 emails now will the software be able to keep up if your needs change to double or triple that need?
? HTML: Can the software handle the creation of HTML newsletters? Newsletters that offer images and links are much better received than ordinary emails. If you cannot send the newsletter in HTML then you will not be able to track it.
? Compatibility: The ease of integrating the email marketing software with your existing database can reduce time in transferring addresses.
? International Support: International character support is often useful when your email marketing campaigns are going abroad.
