Email Marketing Tools for Your Small Business
© 2009, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.
Email marketing can be an effective tool for growing your business. But in order to use this marketing technique to its full potential, you have to keep things simple for yourself. The last thing you want is another weekly task eating up a lot of your time. Fortunately, modern email marketing tools do much of the work for you. And that’s what I’m going to talk about in this blog post.
Quick story. Years ago, when I worked for a direct mail marketing company, I was tasked with creating an email newsletter for the company. It would be something the customers and casual website visitors could sign up for through the website, after which they would receive direct mail tips from the experts. In other words, it was intended to be a classic email marketing newsletter. Two parts helpful information — one part product promotion.
The problems we encountered did not come from the idea itself, but from the execution of the idea. You see, the owners of this company were incredibly egotistical when it came to their I.T. staff. They constantly boasted about how big their I.T. department was, how much money they put into their website, etc. Hey, that’s all well and good. But sometimes, there is simply no need to use your techie team for what could be a simple task. So instead of using one of the many email marketing tools currently available (and there are some good ones out there), this company decided to build their own email newsletter program from scratch.
Long story short, they wasted hundreds of programmer hours over a one-month span, and the program never really worked right in the end. It was full of bugs. So the whole email marketing program was difficult to manage, because it was built on a complex infrastructure. Talk about ego getting the best of you. As you might imagine, the email newsletter idea was abandoned shortly thereafter, and the powers-that-be shifted their focus to the next shiny thing on the horizon.
Email Marketing Logistics - Keep ‘em Simple
What’s the point of this little story I’ve shared? It has a simple moral, actually. Don’t recreate the wheel if you don’t have to! There are companies who have put millions of dollars of investment into their email marketing tools, and they’ve refined them over many years. They offer everything you could possibly want from an email newsletter program, so why on earth would you want to recreate the wheel and create your own.
Keep the logistics simple, and you’ll be able to spend more time on the more important parts of email marketing — developing your content, testing your offers, growing your list, etc. These things are far more important than the scripts and programming behind the scenes. Do some research into the email marketing tools currently on the market, and you’ll quickly realize how much they have to offer.
I have stuck with the same email marketing tool (iContact) for many years, and I would recommend it without hesitation. In fact, I was one of their customers in the early days of their development, when they were just getting their company off the ground. Today, they are a major player in the industry, and their email marketing tools are the reason.