E-mail Marketing: Eliminate The Constant Confusion

As far as (human)  editors go, I have one of the best. With 40 years of professional writing and my belt, that’s saying something. With a statement like that one would think I think highly of editors, or at least mine. Let’s do a reality check. Editors are in management positions. People in management positions are all too often removed from front-line reality.

And so it is the case with my editor giving me an assignment that on the surface looked right up my alley. I need a robust email marketing system for my DoD oriented IT education site. So he suggests I write a factually based series about CRM systems, and gives me the top names.

Sounds good. Emphasis on sounds.

Lets look at comparing one of the industry standards, ConstantContact.com, to Emailmarketing.net (the new kid on the header block)….

I wanted to do a table comparing the two. Forget that. All the data available from ConstantContact is:
“Email newsletters are fast and inexpensive to create. So you can send them more regularly than paper ones. And email marketing puts you in customers’ inboxes more accurately than regular email. So you’ll avoid spam filters and be seen by more people. And you’ll stay top of mind with people who want to hear from you. ”

So what they are telling me is e-mail is better than snailmail. And they will take my money for mysterious ways of avoiding spam filters, probably on the assumption that my potential customers were not really expecting to hear from me.

Now how in the hell do I make a comparison table out of that data?
Now let us contrast that to E-mailMarketing.Net.

I look at the features page and they list it very clearly a veritable cornucopia of items that warm the cockles of my heart. It is certainly no secret that I personally, am hot to trot about mobile devices. So e-mail previews on what my e-mail campaign would look like on a range of different mobile devices (each with market shares great and small) catches my attention.

There is also something else they nailed that really tends to catch everyone’s attention. That magical word, free. While usually much overused, I am initially quite skeptical. My analytical mind understands that unless you are a guest at one of the many franchises collectively known as the Iron Bar Hotel with a Long-Term Stay, your time is anything but free.

While E-mailMarketing.Net has a free trial, I know my time isn’t free. In fact it gets more expensive with every consumed breath. It certainly appears these guys understand that as well. To help me make use of my free trial of their services, they have things that help save me my increasingly expensive lack of time. Such as a collection of free e-mail templates.

Add to that a user interface that is much more friendly (time-saving), built-in A/B split tests, list segmentation and some kick ass reports are just a part of the short list of features that sold me this is the company I want to invest my most precious asset of all in, my time. I am too old to invest my time in companies that want to take my time and suck it down there black hole.

Quoting the first book printed in English on the art of copywriting first printed in 1927 the author made a point with a poem. It goes like this: “Tell me quick and tell me true, otherwise Sir, to hell with you.”

This is something that EmailMarketing.net seems to understand. While their competitors do not, it certainly saved me a lot of time.