Yellow Jersey Web Design

Email marketing is an affordable and effective marketing technique that can help you grow your business while keeping costs low. (The value of Email Marketing)
But do you really need to pay for an email marketing service when you can just as easily send emails from your own email account? You might be surprised to see how many reasons there are to answer yes to this question.

The short answer is that regular email accounts are just not set up for mass email marketing.

We have compiled a simple list of reasons why this is the case, and why an email marketing service might be just what you need to jumpstart your online marketing efforts.

Reason 1:
There are serious potential restrictions from both the sending and receiving end when you use a regular email account.

• Sending – Mass emails can be blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). Most ISPs have a limit to how many emails you can send in one day.
• Receiving -Your emails can be blocked on the receiving end too if they are perceived as spam. With an email marketing service, while your customer sees your address as the “from” address, it is actually sent by the email marketing service. The email marketing service has relationships with the ISPs and therefore they recognize your email is not spam.

Reason 2:
Another potential issue you may run into, sending mass emails from your regular email account, is that there is no system set up to receive notification if your email generates spam complaints.

If your emails are perceived as spam you run the risk of having your entire corporate email server blocked

Reason 3:
There are strict rules for email marketing that you need to follow such as

• A physical address on each email
• An unsubscribe option that must be honored within 10 days
  Email marketing services are required to be aware of all regulations regarding email marketing and are responsible for ensuring your email campaign meets these criteria.

Reason 4:
With an email marketing service you can get detailed, measurable results. This is one my favorite benefits of an email marketing service. If you are spending time and money on marketing it is important to get as detailed a measurement of your response as you possibly can. When you send out marketing, whether it be print or email, you will measure the number of responses to your marketing piece and if you have analytics on your website you can measure whether the hits on your site rose around the time of your marketing efforts. But there are a number of details that you cannot measure, and this can be incredibly frustrating. How many people did it actually reach? How many read it, how many discarded it without giving it much attention. What piqued their interest, where did you lose them?

Many email marketing services will answer all these questions for you by providing you with detailed reports regarding the effectiveness of your email campaign. Many services report the number of emails sent, opened, who opened, who clicked through and which links they clicked on. This enables you to get a much better feel for what appeals to your customer, allowing you to really fine tune your marketing efforts, and giving you a powerful competitive edge.
Reports also show new subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces and formal spam complaints.

Yellow Jersey Design partners with Constant Contact, a provider of an excellent email marketing service. They are affordable and provide a great package for small to medium size businesses. Jersey Design can create a branded template that ties into your website and gives your email campaign a professional polish that will greatly increase its effectiveness and reflect well on your company.

Click here to find out more about Constant Contact or contact us at Yellow Jersey Design