iContact
iContact is an affordable subscription-based service we use ourselves for all customer communications. There are a ton of predesigned HTML templates, and it has excellent tracking capabilities for evaluating open rates, click-throughs, and bounce-backs. Check out our recent iContact blog article for more information or just sign up for a FREE one-month test account.
MailChimp
MailChimp is free for up to 6,000 messages per month and it will store up to 1,000 subscribers. There are also a whole range of paid subscription options that start at $15.00 per month offering additional message delivery and subscriber storage. It’s a great little application that could be the perfect stepping stone in starting up an email marketing campaign or customer relationship management practice to support your business. Check out MailChimp and sign up for free.
Whatever solution you choose, be sure to develop a thoughtful strategy and tactical plan for engaging your customer base for increased revenue. Think about a regular newsletter, timely bulletins or regular promotions to offer special value to this highly-valuable list.
Reminder to Current AppliedI.net Mail List Manager Users: AppliedI.net will be discontinuing our in house mail listmanager service (http://listmanager.appliedi.net/) beginning January 1, 2011. When we first offered this mail listmanager, there weren’t a lot of alternatives out there, and it was a nice added value we could provide for our customers. But these days, web-based email tools have come a long way; they are inexpensive (or even FREE!) as well as being more robust, user-friendly and feature-rich than anything we can offer. This doesn’t impact most of our customers, but for those it does affect, we’ve got two great alternatives to suggest.