April 21st, 2011 → 8:48 pm @ James McLaughlin // No Comments
One online marketing activity that business owner’s often neglect is communicating effectively with their customer’s through email marketing. Usually sub-par tactics are employed to collect email addresses or they aren’t collected at all! Even when there are a fair amount of email contacts, they aren’t communicated with or worse, they are simply pushed offers that don’t educate them. Educating your customers adds value and long lasting relationships that get them talking about your products and services (we’ll get more into that in a moment).
When it comes to email marketing you need a service that will help you deploy hundreds, if not thousands of emails quickly and with statistics behind the results. The most common service that people know about is Constant Contact. I have used this service with many businesses and their service is very reliable and provides all the tools you need. This is not the point of my article though to review Constant Contact. My goal today is to tell you about how you can get email marketing services for free that can grow with your business. Constant Contact has a 30 day free trial, but after that a monthly fee kicks in.
In comes, Mail Chimp – yes another web service named after a Monkey (for those of you that have used Survey Monkey). Mail Chimp is a very easy to use service that offers a “Forever Free” account that allows you to have up to 2,000 contacts in your email list and send up to 6,000 emails per month. It’s not a 30 day trial, it’s not a usage based trial, it’s literally forever free until you go above the threshold of 2,000 contacts or 6,000 emails per month.
Setting up Mail Chimp is easy, simply go to MailChimp.com and sign up for a new account and select Forever Free. Once you’re setup you can import your list and use their features to design an email, send it out to your list, and setup auto-responders. Auto-responders are emails that are automatically sent to people who sign up for your list. In my book, Website Success Factors I go into detail about great tactics that you can use to create an auto-responder communication plan for your business. These features communicate with your customers and add value to them, all while you sleep!
Mail Chimp Offers A Forever Free Email Marketing Account That Is Good Up To 2,000 Contacts and 6,000 Emails Per Month
One of the readers of my book recently contacted me and said, “Wow, I can’t believe how easy Mail Chimp was to setup and I love the free account. I don’t miss Constant Contact at all or the monthly payment that came with it!”.
So what are you waiting for, go sign up for a Mail Chimp account today and add the sign up box to your website with a value added piece of content behind it. Go get it!!!
