E-mailing Newsletters - Contractor Talk - Professional Construction and Remodeling Forum

Remodel Bud · 09-29-2008, 09:55 PM

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AtlRemodeling · 09-30-2008, 05:16 AM

I have been considering this for the last month or so myself but have not had the time to sit down and research the email newsletter services. We had originally planned on emailing from in house so I am very glad I read this article. I certainly do not want to get labeled as a spammer and foul up my ability to email. I have read that the email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with previous clients as well as potential clients.

I did search on complaints about Aweber and Constant Contact. Most of the complaints seemed to be 2-3 years old (nothing more recent than 2006 that I could find). At that time, Constant Contact seemed a little quick to label you as a spammer if you got more than a handful of your emails reported as spam.

Thanks for the info, this is the kick in pants I need to get moving with my email newsletter.

Remodel Bud · 09-30-2008, 06:32 AM

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Carport King · 09-30-2008, 09:34 AM

This is the only way to go from here on out. We have in part of our sales process ask for clients email address. We believe that we will be marketing only with email within 3-5 years.

If you explain it right your clients will have no problem with this. We have a 55,000 client list right now we market to and we are in the process in asking all our existing clients for there email address and the reason why.

Yes we will not get them all but most will because of our current relationship with our clients.

The time is now on learning all the ways to market online because this is our future. Get your mind out of the yellow book because it will be gone-gone in 4-5 years. Wake up to the new kid in town. Online!

carlsore · 09-30-2008, 11:58 AM

Aweber and Constant Contact are both viable autoresponder services... They are hosted solutions so they are responsible for your deliverability.

SendStudio is a piece of software created by a company called Interspire. It's a very slick "self-hosted" (hosted on your own server) autoresponder/newsletter system.

Don't be scared of hosting something like this yourself... Realisticly most contractors will never see a list over 10,000+ (unless they are incredibly proactive with their list building as some here appear to be) many more will not spend the time/resources.

With these smaller lists you will not have an issue with most hosting accounts. It's important your autoresponder system has a "double opt-in" or "confirmation" function as well...

Works like this:

Customer Fills Out Subscription Box (on your website)
Customer Receives Email Asking To Confirm.
Customer Clicks Link In Email - Confirming.

You will build a much "cleaner" list that way and not only that it's considered best practice and most webhosts will have no problem with you emailing a confirmed list. Should a SPAM complaint arise, you've got the documentation nessecary to come out on top.

Your hosting company will likely "throttle" the outgoing email from your account (5000-10,000 seem to be standard limits) Usually a quick phone call explaining what you are doing, and the newsletters purpose, and you can have that throttling raised up if you need it.

Emailing a confirmed list of say 10,000 once a week would be no sweat for most shared hosting accounts.

With all the above said... Email marketing is not really the latest and greatest for a newsletter. It still has many pitfalls...

A more direct approach would be using RSS (Real Simple Syndication) to keep in contact with your clients/prospects. Many autoresponder systems out there both hosted and self-hosted are starting to support RSS subscriptions.

RSS is more attractive then email because there are no deliverability problems or spam issues. Your RSS feed is delivered right into your clients RSS reader (which Yahoo, MSN, AOL all provide.) It's rapidly becoming a widely adopted online tool for surfers and marketers have been taking advantage of it for a few years already.

RSS is basically a direct communication channel to a clients desktop as opposed to sending out an email that can be junked, filtered, lost, deleted by accident etc...

Hope this helps!

Carl Sorensen

Remodel Bud · 09-30-2008, 12:13 PM

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Publisher1 · 09-30-2008, 03:52 PM

I've used constant contact for a couple of years now; it is quite simple and relatively easy to maintain and catches the opt-in requests. I supplement this service with a canadian email service, bettermail.ca which allows file attachments and (until a very recent innovation at constant contact) allows autoresponders, where cc didn't. (They just sent a notice today sayiing an autoresponder feature has been included).

the biggest problem with e-mail marketing, as an earlier poster indicated, is that I'm finding a rather low open rate of about 20 - 25 per cent; this could be because people aren't interested or (more disturbingly) the eletters are finding their way into spamblocks.

Still, the eletters are truly inexpensive and I can tace some worthwhile business to them.

Remodel Bud · 09-30-2008, 06:17 PM

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Remodel Bud · 10-01-2008, 02:16 PM

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SethHoldren · 10-01-2008, 06:44 PM

I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the "internet marketing" community as part of my constant ongoing research.

Among IM gurus, the two email autoresponder services that always rise to the top in discussions like this are GetResponse and AWeber. And AWeber seems to be the consensus. But the others are good too.

AWeber has an excellent reputation among service providers. And it has some great tools to keep your "spam" factor low. The other services may have this option as well.

AWeber is versatile, and very easy to use. Also, it has an incredible amount of sophistication, especially if you want to manage multiple email lists. Of course, it's all double opt-in. Which I believe is the most ethical way to go--the only way to go these days.

You can use it to design nice looking HTML newsletters, or just for plain text.

Of course, plain text will get you a higher delivery rate. But HTML can make your newsletter look more professional.

There are different schools of thought out there regarding improving open rates. If I simply sent out a quick broadcast email, I will get around 20% to 30% open rate. But if I use a creative subject line that attracts attention, I have gotten up to 80% open rates. It also depends on a number of other factors such as time of day/week/month/year, and other things too.

Remodel Bud · 10-01-2008, 08:35 PM

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SethHoldren · 10-01-2008, 11:11 PM

Most email service providers have a complicated formula for determining the "spam level" of incoming emails.

Many factors make an email look "spammy".

To put it simply, just consider what an email from a good friend would look like. An email like that would be the gold standard for deliverability.

Conversely, consider the characteristics of a common spam email. A lot of them are HTML. And they have words like "free" and "gift" and many other common spam words.

Here's what AWeber has to say specifically about HTML:

Quote:

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

AWeber's email system makes it very simple to include both plain text and HTML.

SethHoldren · 10-01-2008, 11:14 PM

Here's some more stuff about email deliverability from AWeber:

Quote:

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.
Words/phrases:
Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.
Images:
Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.
Attachments:
With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.