15 reasons you should be using a proper e-mail campaign service

I had a fella ask me the other day why he should pay for iContact when he could just use some software and send from his own servers. I laughed and told him I could probably think of at least 15 solid reasons but I couldn't do so on the spot so I told him I would write a post about it. PS I do not have any affiliation with Icontact (or any other email services for that matter), I just think it's brilliant and use it all the time!

1. They have relationships with ISPs giving your emails the best chance of getting through firewalls etc and to their intended recipients.
   
2. They check your spam score before sending reducing the chances of all your efforts becoming a dud.
   
3. They tend to not let you bend any anti-spam laws (or at lease make you accountable of them) meaning that you can't spam, even by mistake.
   
4. If every bulk email software was like this, we would have very little spam in the world, kind of like what the smoking ban has done for pubs and restaurants - they are just a much better place to be now!
   
5. They usually offered unlimited email lists so you could have one account and manage multiple lists for multiple clients, or many lists for your company which is a good way of targeting the ultra-niches evident online these days.
   
6. They're cheap. Come on, a few dollars a month the get a 360 degree solution on emails which you can track directly back to sales is definitely worth it.
   
7. Look out for the service that charge per email address, not per email sent. Makes a big difference if you send to your lists more than once a month.
   
8. They recognise the same email across lists counting the same email as one email address so they don't charge you extra.
   
9. Strong competition in the industry ensures that standards of service, quality and price are always improving. Check out Icontact and Constant Contact, two of the industry's biggest players.
   
10. Thorough reporting on everything you need to measure success of your email campaign or that of your clients. Opens, clicks, deliveries, bounces, unsubscribes etc.
    
11. You don't have to send on your own, already overloaded, servers. If you send out 50 000 emails in HTML on your own servers while still trying to keep the office's online services running, good luck!
    
12. Do you really want to mange subscribes and unsubscribes manually across multiple lists of tens of thousands of emails when it can be done for you automatically and even have a report produced on it?
    
13. Sign up forms are simple, brilliant things. Set them up however you like and copy/paste the code into any web page / blog and grow your list organically. You can also select which list that sign up form should add emails to.
    
14. They have the facility to survey users on your lists. I would pay for that service on it's own!
    
15. They are getting into this social sharing thing and even include varying levels of share buttons at the bottom of their emails now.
    

Guerrilla Web 2.0 Marketing

What is Guerrilla marketing? Wikipedia defines it as this:

"Guerrilla Marketing" was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, as an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

So my dad opened a Fishmonger the other day and shortly after that I got the call:
‘Jon, I need to market the restaurant.’
‘Cool, what’s your budget?’
’ Budget? Emails are free.’

Try to remember that the most advanced piece of equipment when my dad started out in retail was a machine that sent papers over the phone line and was considered a personal success when you received one without the machine jamming!

So of course, before I knew it, I was in a Guerrilla marketing campaign, which I haven’t attempted since the early naughties in the web 1.0 days. When I thought through a strategy, I found myself surprised that I had not entered a low/no budget campaign in the social media space as it is the perfect place to do it. I’ve obviously been spoilt by big client budgets of late so it’s time to get back to basics.

Guerrilla Web 2.0 marketing is all about getting people to ‘chat and share’ without spending a cent.

So I did what I do best and started a blog to place the restaurant right in the middle of the social space. It’s called www.fishmongermidrand.com (if you have no luck with that, try www.fishmongermidrand.blogspot.com as I have just registered the domain) so as you may have figured out, the restaurant is a Fishmonger in Midrand.

But you need a conversation point and a reason for people to share information about the website so I devised a 2 for 1 sushi special with my pops that will be available all day on Wednesdays. It is my hope that (of course) a killer special like this will get people spreading this blog around the South African internet and it will get some people into the restaurant.

So if you like sushi (and here is my shameless plug), sign up your email at the blog and spread the news about it please! I’ll also let my loyal readers know that the first voucher comes out this Monday so sign up now!

There might be a few more shameless plugs from me going forward for a while so please excuse me or listen to my plugging and help me spread the word. Thanks!

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