Being a parent, I get a fair share of email communications from school, youth sports organizations and other related groups. I also subscribe to some small business e-newsletters.
I cringe whenever I receive one and all of the recipients are clearly visible in the Sent To field. Not good!
Whether an email list is 10 or 10,000, it needs to be handled with great care.
Not taking proper precautions to collect, store and send to an email list puts the sender in certain liability. How? Just imagine if one of the email addresses on your list is a spammer. You send out an email campaign, paste your list in the CC rather than the BCC fields and bang: The spammer now has your email list to start sending a river of junk mail, or worse, a message-containing virus.
An easy and affordable way to gain and maintain the trust of your email recipients is to use a hosted email marketing software solution.
They provide secure and ethical means to:
1. Collect email addresses
2. Maintain lists in a secure environment (on their servers, not your easily misplaced thumb drive!)
3. Create professional-looking mailers on pre-formatted templates
4. Provide the recipient with a visible and simple option to unsubscribe (required by law)
5. Get your mailers successfully delivered to your recipients (loosely-crafted mailers often get caught in spam filters)
6. Find out how your mailer performed. How many people received it, opened it, and clicked through to your website.
7. Gain access from any computer. Because they are hosted, you can log in anywhere, from any computer and there is no software to download.
Another nice feature of email campaign software is it keeps your list fresh by weeding out bounced, incomplete, suspect and duplicate addresses.
Constant Contact, MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are three leading options. They all have similar features and fees. I am familiar with all three, and use Campaign Monitor quite frequently (screenshot of Campaign Monitors spiel below).
All provide a free account level where you can add and store your list(s), and only pay for sent campaigns.
For example, Campaign Monitor charges 5 dollars plus 1 cent per address for each emailer you send. So a mailer with 100 email addresses will cost you 6 bucks.
Not bad at all for a professionally sent email campaign...and better night's sleep!
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