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How to Choose an Email Marketing Program

It’s no secret that the easiest and fastest way to communicate with existing customers and potential leads is via email. Once you consider managing mailing list databases and actually attempting to track the effectiveness of your communications, though, things can seem far from easy. Thankfully there are affordable services available that have been designed to eliminate the technological burden and time suck that comes along with attempting to manage email marketing manually.

One such service is offered by iContact, a Durham, North Carolina company with a global email marketing reach. Their 15-day free trial is available without a credit card (and they pledge not to use your registration information for mailing list marketing) at http://www.icontact.com. Although there are many benefits to outsourcing email marketing management, one of the greatest is the simplicity it offers: many powerful features are incorporated into a single, affordable product that lets you manage campaigns of all sizes from a single outlet.

Email Marketing Simplified: Features

Features available with a service like iContact, for example, include message scheduling, open and click-through tracking, bounce-back handling, subscription management, integrated surveying, industry leading deliverability, and over 300 professionally-designed email templates. With a menu like that, it’s easy to see why over 64,000 customers are currently using the service.

Open and click-through tracking is a highly valuable tool that lets you monitor the habits of your recipients. You’ll be able to see what subject lines are grabbing attention, and which are being ignored –and what body copy is compelling action while other text may be less actionable. You can then proactively tweak your approach accordingly for even better results. Real-time charts and statistics accompany this data to give you maximum control over the big picture.

What to Look For in an Email Marketing Provider

One thing that sets a business like iContact apart is their whitelist status with many major Internet service providers. This means they can offer deliverability rates of between 98 and 99% – in short, your message needs to reach its maximum potential audience to get you the returns you want, and you need a service that can promise that level of access.

Ease-of-use is another area of concern. Your management system should be simple and connected to ensure you’re getting the most out of your time and money, yet also have supplemental tools that give you extra power when you need it – features like surveys, autoresponders, and RSS feeds are great resources to keep handy.

Most email marketing companies are happy to discuss your needs and offer solutions that work in harmony with your operations and business needs. Start with a clear idea of the current challenges you face and the goals you hope to achieve with an improved marketing system, and you’ll be off to a great start.