Email marketing is well known to be one of the most powerful elements necessary for a business to succeed online today. Not only can you stay in touch with your visitors and foster a community atmosphere, but email marketing allows you to make follow up sales long after a customer has left your site.
Before the days of email marketing, a visitor might come to your site, browse the products and information, and then make a decision to buy right then and there. If they purchased something, you made money one time from them. If they left, you may never have had the chance to make money from them again. Email lists allow you to keep customers and visitors interested in your company and site in the hopes that they may turn into repeat customers.
Once email marketing began, however, it became a huge market very quickly, and suddenly there were dozens of providers and hundreds of options to choose from. This number is increasing every year, making it harder and harder for new site owners to know where to even begin. To help you decide which email marketing service is right for you, here is a comparative list of the top 5 providers today.
Aweber
Aweber is a very large player in the email marketing field because of it’s user-friendly interface a reasonable monthly fee. For a $1 trial and $19 a month after that, you get unlimited lists, many options for managing and tracking messages, 150+ premade templates for forms and emails, and much more. Building autoresponders and sending broadcast emails is very simple with the program, and for most small businesses, everything they need is included for a very low price. There is even the option of attaching files to your messages – a great idea to help you deliver those eBooks and freebie files.
On the negative side, some believe that the newsletter templates provided are too limited, and to have a custom one created you will either need to know code or hire someone to create one for you. Aweber also only handles emails – it does not have any options for handling ecommerce or affiliates.