17 Tips On Choosing The Right Email Marketing Software

This is an excellent post by Lior! If you do not have an email marketing system for your business or organization… it is about time! If you are looking for an excellent email marketing system, I fully support ExactTarget. Read the post and let me know your thoughts. Have fun! – Kyle

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If you’re new to email marketing finding the right software or service to handle the spreading of your message to all your eager subscribers can be a daunting task. After all there are so many companies out there and of course every single one of them claims to be the very best in providing customers like you with an email marketing solution that will blow your socks off.

We’ve made it far easier for you to make your mind up with 17 great tips for choosing the right email marketing software for your business.

1. What Are Your Goals?

Is this just for a small newsletter or a solution destined for a large corporate online presence? If you’re not sure then check with experienced email marketers or even just call the customer support team for the solution you’re considering.

2. Multiple List Management

Whatever software, service or package you choose it must be able to support multiple lists and campaigns – you’ll be surprised at just how creative you’ll become with this type of marketing.

3. List Segmentation

As your experience and requirements grow you’re eventually going to need to be able to split your list into different groups and email them separately for A/B or what’s also called split testing purposes.

4. Formatting

Whatever email marketing software you choose should have both HTML and plain text formatting options available to you.

5. Spam Checker

Even the most basic of email marketing solutions should be able to check your messages to ensure they’re going to pass through any spam filter with ease.

6. Autoresponder Sequences

You should be able to create multiple sequences across several email campaigns without having to dig through help files every single time – it should be an intuitive point-and-click experience for you.

7. Open Rates

If you’re serious about this type of marketing then you’ll need statistics on not only how many emails have been sent successfully but how many of them have actually been opened and read.

8 Click Tracking

If you’ve included a URL in your email then you’ll need to know how many times it was clicked for that particular mailing.

9. Self Hosted Or?

You’ll have the option of either hosting the software on your own servers or paying a third party company to use the software hosted on their servers instead. Both have their own set of benefits.

10. Double Opt-In

If the email marketing solution you’re checking out doesn’t offer a double opt-in process then avoid it.

11. Social Media Enabled?

Can the software or service be used with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for example?

12. Forms, Forms, Forms

A very complete email marketing software package will include several copy-and-paste forms for you to use on your website or blog.

13. HTML Enabled

Not everyone likes or wants to receive plain text emails so the software has to provide both templates and support for HTML email.

14. Blog to Email

This feature means that once you create a new blog post it’s automatically emailed to your subscribers to save you the additional task of doing it manually – neat!

15. Deliverability

Having the best features and flashiest interface in the world is no good if your emails are automatically blocked by spam filters – some software packages and email marketing companies have FAR higher delivery success rates than others.

16. Free Or Paid?

Again this will come down to a mixture of what you can afford and what your requirements are. Some of the free packages work really well but you’ll eventually have to upgrade to a more professional solution.

17. Scalability

What is the maximum number of subscribers or opt-ins the system can handle without falling apart or incurring extra fees? If your business plan revolves around building a list of 100,000 opt-ins make sure the software can support it.

These tips will help you wade through the sea of email marketing options you’re going to be presented with. Hopefully we’ve helped make the selection process a little less painful.

This post is by Lior Levine, a marketing consultant for personalized oncology services , and a marketing strategist for the Tel Aviv University program Ma in security.