Contact Manager Comparison Shopping
Dollar for Dollar, e-mail marketing is one of the least expensive ways to stay in touch with your customers. I have used and set up for my clients some of the major e-mail management sites.
I will review the top 3 in order to help you get a good idea of what they are good for.
This site is, by far, one of the best I have used. It has templates for the not-so-graphically inclined, lots of help resources, and is fairly intuitive to configure to your needs. One of the main things I like about it is that it is a by-the-email price so if you have an infrequent list that you email to, there is no monthly charge – you buy a block and use it until it is gone. The bigger the block the more you save, but the starting price is just a penny-and-a-half per email, so $15 for 1000. Great for small lists, and infrequently mailed lists. Vertical Response even has an option for a direct mail postcard campaign – and not a bad price for this either.
– I have set up many clients on this because of it’s ease of use. Lots and lots of templates and features, and it’s interface is pretty basic.
The pricing is overall very good and there is a monthly fee based on the size of the list. This makes it good for frequently emailed lists, and larger ones. One thing that I don’t really like about Constant Contact is that they do call you once you sign up, but some people may like that.
This company has an overall lower cost than Constant Contact, but is a good company…I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but the pricing is good and so is the customer service. One of the bonus features is an autoresponder with iContact, making the $9.95 per month a really great deal.
Lots of templates an 500k of free image hosting is also a nice feature.
All of these feature some kind of tracking of statistics to monitor how successful you blast was, survey creation, and most importantly, list management of your opt-in and opt-out customers.