Dear Forum Folk,

We have just invested in a practice management application (we are an accountancy practice) which has certain CRM features but very limited on email marketing.... its thrown my plans out of window. My experience within email marketing is very limited.

After building a list of opt in email addresses from an exhibition and various other data capture techniques, I am stuck on how to execute the campaign. .

I do not want to dilute the data within the practice management app as the total count is in excess of 4,000, we have 600+ clients and therefore thinking about running a ecrm to deal with campaign.........

Can someone please recommend a cost effective application or service which will allow us to deliver a half decent multiple newsletters over a 7-9 month period, and be able to not lose control over the results. 

Alex

Hi Alex,

Why dont you take a look at our website.  We provide the ability to offer email newsletter broadcasts as well as enhancing your everyday business email in various innovative ways.

Also we charge per number of users and not per email volume as most email marketing companies - which means for lower volumes we can be much more cost effective.

www.rocketseed.com

All the best, Steve
sward@rocketseed.com

Hello Alex,

There's dozens of different suppliers (check out e-consultancy's rather good buyer's guide to email marketing solutions). The main things to consider are:

• can you run software in-house or would you prefer a hosted solution?
• do you need production help or will you handle it in-house?
• what sophistication do you require from your tools? do you want to deliver your emails, or will you be segmenting your list e.g. a different email to clients than to prospects? (most tools will handle this)
  

You'll also find a massive variation in feature sets, pricing and services. Probably the most important thing to kick off with is to define what your aims are for your newsletters.

The biggest barrier, especially if you've not done this before, is actually the production side of things: copy, design, layout, testing, testing, testing (so many email clients, so little time). If you're in this camp, I'd be tempted to look for a solution that has some templates that you can adapt to get going quickly. Especially if these templates have been tested on the common email platforms that are used by your clients.

Another key thing when setting your goals is what will define your email activity as successful. More sales? Leads? Most email suppliers will give your tracking and open/clickthrough information. You might also want to look at those which allow you to track whether a form was filled out e.g. for an enquiry to give you a better idea of the effect.

Hope that helps - a bit general - but I'd definitely take a look at the buyers guide to get your bearings. You'll be able to tell pretty quickly which solutions will be within your price range - the swankiness of the website is often a dead giveaway!

Drop me a line if you have any questions.

Toodle Pip

Sam