Email Marketing

This is my new find and I'm simply loving it - MailChimp!

Email marketing is a great way to reach out to customers (assuming you don't bombard them with 1001 emails in a week) in a cost-effective - and "green" - way. I've used a variety of email marketing tools in my past corporate life but many of them were technically challenging for a non-IT person and very cost prohibitive for small businesses.

Then I found MailChimp and my whole email marketing world changed. What's so great about MailChimp? Well, it lets you create completely customizable email marketing campaigns in a way that even a technophobe like myself can manage. It keeps track of a bunch of vital stats such as how many people have opened up your email messages, how many messages have bounced, and how many people have unsubscribed (so you can remove them from future marketing lists). But best of all for a small business - they have a "Pay-As-You-Go" feature for companies who aren't sending out email campaigns on a frequent basis. And it's cost effective!

For example, I sent out my first email campaign this morning to promote some Valentine's Day items. For $15 I was able to buy 500 credits which enables me to send out email messages to 500 different email addresses. Since at this point my list of qualified "opted-in" contacts isn't 500 names long, I only use the credits I need and hold onto the remainder until my next campaign. This campaign cost me $.03 per email to send out (not including the time I took to design it - but that's the fun part) versus the $.23 it would cost simply to put postage on a company postcard and that doesn't even include the cost of getting the postcard printed.

If it's not obvious, I'm pretty amped about MailChimp. And once again, I'm not being paid or reimbursed for this plug in any way. I just believe that there are so few services out there that enable small business to take advantage of the same avenues - and look professional doing it - as the big guys that this is definitely worth shouting from the rooftops. Don't believe me? Check them out at http://www.mailchimp.com/.