Email marketing--a second try

(For those entering our story in the middle, our hero had distributed his first email marketing newsletter in January, all by hand. It took three days of labor and caused him to swear revenge on his ISP. Click here to get the gory details. Somehow, it was a beneficial exercise, but there had to be a better, more effective way.)

It was now April, and time for the second quarterly newsletter. After checking out a bunch of email marketing service companies (there are lots of them--you can see them referenced at the bottom of virtually every email newsletter you receive), I signed up with Listrak.

The experience was light-years different. The service easily imported my two contact lists and eliminated duplicate addresses. It had an easy interface for me to load and edit my newsletter. I could send the newsletter to different test email addresses and see how it looked on Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. And with one click I could schedule the delivery of the newsletter at any time.

And it went out, last Thursday.

The results: 60% more newsletters delivered. 250+ bad email addresses identified. Clear traceability of who opened and read the newsletter. Tracking of each click on the newsletter. Oh, and about 80% less time spent on the process.

DISCLOSURE: Listrak's Director of Marketing is a former colleague of mine. She's written a lot of useful white papers on email marketing that you might want to read.

email marketing, marketing, social networking