Every business should be engaging in some form of email marketing or another. Whether frequent or infrequent, staying in front of your customers is marketing 101. There are hundreds of email marketing service providers out there and that can be overwhelming. Who do you use? What’s a good deal? What features should they provide? Let’s dig a little deeper as we outline what the right ESP is for your restaurant and/or company.
In order to establish the right service provider for email marketing, first you need to answer a couple of questions.
1. How many email marketing messages do you plan on sending per month or year?
2. How many people have subscribed to your email list?
3. Do you have an ad agency or designer on contract?
Frequent Emails, Large Lists, with or without a Designer
If you’re sending out email blasts once or more per month, then you need to look into a monthly fee service provider. The top three that we have used and like are MailChimp.com, iContact.com and Fishbowl.com. They all offer templates that you can customize and allow you send out as many emails as you would like as many times as you would like per month.
Infrequent email marketing, small lists with a designer or agency
If you’re more of a quarterly email type of company or marketer. Look to a service that charges per email sent. We’ve used CampaignMonitor religiously for these types of clients. You will probably need some technical knowledge to navigate this service.
Infrequent email marketing, small lists without a designer or agency
We suggest going with a service like MailChimp.com or Fishbowl.com. The user interfaces are extremely simple and they have templates you can customize.
All in all, you want to have the ability to review the statistics on your campaigns. Who is opening them? Where do they click? Do they convert? Whose emails bounced? They must also manage subscribing and unsubscribing.
Don’t think that these email marketing service providers are providing something that Outlook can do just fine. That’s simply not true. Choose a vendor and see the results.
