web based email marketing

[Chubbard]

I'll throw my 2 cents in and advocate for Emma email marketing. I started out using MailChimp for our company newsletter, but really hated the interface. For me, personally, Emma was a simpler tool to navigate; that said, I don't currently use their automation tools, because I'd rather base my emailing on internal tracking data than theirs.

We rarely "blast" our entire database. If a new promotion starts, or we have general company updates (like holiday hours or special give-aways), then there's usually just one general blast and from there, I segment.

No matter who you choose, don't blast. It's so lazy. Spend the time segmenting your leads and serving them relevant content.

Also, check your Sender Score from time to time. Our most recent top 4 send scores are 95,98,99, and 98. We face the same challenges of getting bumped by Google to the Promotions tab in Gmail, but we've only had 1 notice in 12+ months about our database, and that was because one major list that hadn't been cleaned up was used. This is a bit old, but should give you a decent idea of where your scores should be, no matter which route you ultimately take for distribution.

 

[Randy Cole]

All good points Chubbard - and totally agree on a non-opted in list - do not blast! Not sure when you stopped using MailChimp but I hated it as well only a few years ago. They have come a long way recently and once I got my head around their interface (newly designed - mostly to incorporate the new automation/parsing and segmentation capabilities) I really started enjoying it. The revamp and redesign is really well done.

I don't say that to be argumentative - some people like the color blue some like red better!

Regarding building a newsletter in MailChimp - I would never want to do that, as it is (like every other email platform like Constant Contact/Complaint, and A(clunky)Weber) very cumbersome. But it ties in nicely with our emailBuilder, which is a tool made specifically for building email templates. Then, once done, one click of the button and our emailBuilder newsletter is ported right into the account ready for any final tweaks, sending out proofs and scheduling for send out. That's a good feature to have for anyone who wants to cut down time on weekly newsletter creation and scheduling. I also like their new feature which allows you to let the system choose which send times are best for any particular time zone, based on accumulated/averaged responses from the millions of emails going out every week.

Overall it has saved me a few hours a week. But the best tool for anyone is always the tool you feel most comfortable/efficient with and which gets the job done for you.

 

[neerajd]

I use Mailchimp for Email campaigns to our Clients. Mailchimp allows you to Design your Campaign as well as Automate it. Mailchimp will show you Delivered, Bounced, Opened, Most opened Subscribers list, Geographical details, Subscribers, unsubcriptions and much more.
You can also Export your contacts from Excel file to Mailchimp which saves a lot of time. Mailchimp Dashboard has different KPIs for Projecting Valuable Statistics.

 

[Chris Leslie]

I dont know how many people in the auto space are using something like Salesforce but other than that I wouldn't use the CRM as a Marketing Solution. CRM's and Marketing platforms are different. In a perfect world automotive crm's would build in something like mailchimp via their API's rather than slapping together a sub-par campaign builder.

When you go away from using a confined environment like the automotive CRM for your web marketing needs. You can do all sorts of things with automation and goals just to scratch the service.

If you really want to "Give Good Marketing" I would suggest using the products that are the best for what you want them to do. In most cases they aren't going to be the same thing.

 

[cgdutoit]

One thing to consider is a good middle ground between an email marketing system and your CRM...and that is Marketing Automation platforms. MA has been used by most companies doing online business. The concept is relatively simple...you track people visiting your site. At first they are anonymous. Once they provide an email address, they are now identified and you can track what they do. You then score them based on their actions and once they reach a certain score, you hand them to Sales. More importantly for this thread/discussion though is they offer full email functionality. You can set up drip campaigns, send emails, automatically handle bounces, unsubcribes etc. More advanced functionality includes automatically changing their drip campaign based on their actions, social media monitoring etc. I find it to be a good middle ground in that as was pointed out in this thread ... the CRMs sometimes are terrible at email, and the email systems are terrible at their "crm like" functionality. The marketing automation platforms are a trade off.

There are a couple of big name Marketing Automation platforms:

• Pardot (owned by Salesforce)
• Marketo
• Hubspot
• Eleqoua

And this one deserves serious consideration because they have an open source (ie. FREE) version:

• Mautic

The commercial ones will run you around $300-$2500 per month. However I think Mautic is sufficient for businesses that don't have crazy marketing automation requirements. May be worth checking out. If anyone has questions about marketing automation let me know...will be happy to try and answer!

Chris
PS: I have NO affiliation with any of the above (Free or commercial) platforms.

 

[Chris Leslie]

I've never heard of Mautic before and am really really (thats really squared) interested in this. I just signed up for their slack community and am going to give this a go..

 

[Alexander Lau]

Here's my list and ranking:

1. iContact
2. Constant Contact
3. MailChimp
4. Campaigner
5. GetResponse
6. AWeber
7. Pinpointe
8. Benchmark Email
9. VerticalResponse
10. Mad Mimi

I didn't include Automotive systems. I thought you wanted to know which are the largest web-based, non-CRM systems.

 

[cgdutoit]

Also for those just looking to JUST send email, consider using Amazon SES (Simple Email Service). When coupled with a program like sendy (http://sendy.co) it is 100x cheaper than using one of the big name email guys. It'll cost about a $1 for a 10,000 email send. Sendy, the software, is a one time $60 (approx) charge. That said, it requires a little bit of technical know-how, both in terms of setting up Amazon SES and installing Sendy. If you don't have crazy amounts of email then I wouldn't really bother with Sendy. The other guys (mailchimp, constant contact etc) are definitely easier to use.

 

[SeanW]

I dont know how many people in the auto space are using something like Salesforce but other than that I wouldn't use the CRM as a Marketing Solution. CRM's and Marketing platforms are different. In a perfect world automotive crm's would build in something like mailchimp via their API's rather than slapping together a sub-par campaign builder.

That hit home, my auto group had to scramble last minute and ended up using mail chimp because our CRM's domain was blocked by spamhaus.org. We were unable to individually email customers or send email blasts to comcast.com, hotmail.com, aol.com customers. MailChimp is great but going back and forth between the CRM and MailChimp is a pain.

 

[umer.autojini]

If you are looking for your own dedicated IP ranges then I can help. Dedicated IPS, SPF, DMARC. Port 25 or PostFix mail server.