Sending emails to your distribution lists is one of the most effective tools for internet marketing, creating loyalty programs and maintaining them, increasing traffic to your website, and all other web marketing activities. In the Newsletter market there are many players, which provide different services at different levels of quality. This article creates a list of necessary characteristics for effective management of mailing lists, and helps you know what to look for when choosing a mailing system service provider.
- One of the most important things to take into consideration is the amount and quality of the statistics and tracking abilities that you get for every sent email. With advanced tracking abilities you can wisely manage your mailing lists and send relevant and interesting information every time. Here are a few statistics you can get regarding your mails from different service providers:
- How many users opened their newsletters? The number of recipients that opened your mail, including information about who opened it (emails) and when (time and date).
- How many have requested to be removed? The number of request to be removed from your mailing list and the list of emails.
- Unsent mails – the number of unsent mails, grouped according to the return reason (mailbox is full/blocked/non-existing mail address/automatic reply/other), and a list of addresses (emails).
- Traffic to site – how may recipients clicked and entered your website through your newsletter, who entered the website and when.
- Clicks through Rate – statistics for the click rates of every link in your newsletter, who clicked what, and when.
- A comparison of statistics – a comparison of different mail items, and a general quantification. It allows you to see the big picture and to compare different mail items.
- Real-time statistics – crucial for those running daily distribution lists or instant messaging list.
- A list of interests can be an important feature to which you should pay attention. With such a list, every user could choose their own field of interests (such as: water sports, extreme sports, and tennis), and you could specify the information and type of advertisements you send to them accordingly.
- Automatic removal from mailing lists is crucial for an effective management of mailing lists. This way, the user will get the best service you can offer, while you save yourself some work. It is important to make sure that such a removal could also be done manually so you can maintain complete control over your information.
- Management of different mailing lists for the same username – using the right platform, it is possible to manage an entire business, with many mailing lists, customers and recipients. With this ability, you can manage several of your clients from the same user, and in this way prevent having to use several usernames for the same service.
- Templates – many mailing services provide their users with predesigned mailing templates therebyalleviating your need to design them yourself.
- Language support – not all newsletter services have Multilanguage Support. You should check this before registering.
- Sponsors – many newsletter services provide their own sponsors and statistics allowing you to recruit more sponsors for your business and to get real and accurate statistics about your CTR (Click through Rate) in every mail and for every sponsor, and to report/bill your client accordingly. The same goes for publishing coupons for your sponsors or for yourself.
- Free Trial – a free trial is always the easiest way to truly evaluate any kind of work platform. In the Direct Mailing platform market, there are many players who offer to open a free account for a certain period of time or limited to a curtain number of mails (usually up to 100 a month).