Email distribution and newsletter mailing services are among the best and most utilized email marketing tools available out there. They allow you to get in touch with your audience in a direct and intimate way trough autoresponders, direct messages, and any type of newsletter format that can be used to market your ideas, or your online product or service. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best commercial newsletter distribution and mailing list services available out there, as well as complementary review information to help you select the best solution for your specific needs.
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Using an email newsletter remains to date one of the best ways to create a real “conversation” with your audience, as emails remain the most direct and intimate way of communicating online.
Commercial newsletter distribution services are perfect to create this intimate relationship with your community of fans, because they offer advanced control over how you distribute your content to your mailing lists, how you layout and present your content in them, and over how you personalize and customize it so that it reads and feels written personally to all of your subscribers.
To use your newsletter effectively though, it is very important that you remember to use a confidential writing style. Putting yourself in the same shoes of your audience in fact, helps you have a greater understanding of what your customer really need and what you can offer them. Your audience must be made up of friends hanging from your lips, anxiously awaiting your next product or discovery.
What is also interesting, is that “commercial” is not equal to “expensive” in the case of newsletter distribution services. These professional tools in fact will often cost you less than $50/month to manage an average a few thousand subscribers.
Newsletter distribution services are also very easy to use, because, from a technical standpoint they are generally as simple and easy to use as sending a standard email message.
But, how do you select the right newsletter distribution service and what features and traits do characterize these offerings?
Generally, commercial newsletter distribution services are all characterized by the following set of standard features:
- List Management: You can create mailing lists to organize contacts who will receive your newsletter and you can also easily handle subscribes and unsubscribes.
- Scheduling: You can plan precise times and dates to send your newsletter.
- Autoresponders: You can design a set of email content templates which are automatically sent when your subscribers perform specific actions. For example, if a reader subscribes to your newsletter, she will receive a “Thank you” email in return, or an email which introduces her to your latest story and offerings.
- Embeddable sign-up form: You can place an embeddable registration form on your website or blog to facilitate readers and customers to subscribe to your newsletter. The sign-up form is fully managed and hosted by the newsletter service.
- Support: You receive assistance in the form of tutorials or support forums, to learn how to manage your email marketing campaigns efficiently, and oftentimes the service you choose will even share with you how to maximize your efforts when planning your email campaign.
While these are just some of the basic features that all commercial newsletter distribution services support, there are more specific features that really differentiate some of these services from the others.
To help you identify your ideal commercial newsletter distribution service, here below there is a set of comparative tables and individual reviews.
Here are the specific selection criteria used to compare these different services:
- Mailing list segmentation: Organization of your newsletter subscribers in niche-targeted groups of interest.
- Spam filter preview: Test to verify if major Internet providers will treat your email newsletter as spam.
- Customizable API: Integration of the newsletter distribution service with your business applications or content management system.
- Personalization: Automatically address your newsletter subscribers using their first names or company names.
- Analytics: Reports and statistics about the performance of your email newsletter (subscribes, unsubscribes, opened emails, etc.)
- Manual mailing list import: Upload of your subscribers by hand (instead of using an automatic procedure) to have greater control over your mailing lists and avoid spam.
- Custom sign-up form: Management of the data fields to include in the embeddable sign-up form for your newsletter.
- Price: Cost of the email newsletter distribution service.
Please note that, due to the large number of commercial newsletter distribution services available, this list does not claim to be yet fully exhaustive and complete as more tools and services will be added over the coming weeks and months thanks to your own feedback and suggestions.
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