Which makes for a good email newsletter service?

Sometimes the email newsletter distribution service is as important as the message itself.

In this big ocean of email marketing service providers (ESPs), how do you decide which one is right for you? How do you know if you’re getting the best deal at the right prices? How do you know if you’ve got all the features you need? These are some of the questions we’ll deal with in this article.

When signing up for an email newsletter distribution service, there are some key features you should look out for.

The single biggest advantage of email newsletters is its capability to give you a targeted and personalized marketing communication tool. This is why creating, maintaining, managing and optimizing your contact list is critical. You need to make sure that your ESP offers you the tools to segment your contact lists based on pre-specified as well as custom fields. When compared with other ESPs like Bronto and Constant Contact, Benchmark Email is the only one that offers high-end list segmentation for sharp, targeted email newsletter distribution.

Another important criterion when selecting an email newsletter distribution service is its user-friendliness. Good ESPs go the extra mile to ensure that email newsletter creation is quick and easy. Right from organizing your contact list to creating the newsletter to delivering and tracking, the best ESPs enable you to do all this in just a few clicks. Unlike Bronto and Constant Contact, both novices and experts find Benchmark Email easy to use.

While sending out emails is the key task for any email newsletter distribution service, they also play a crucial role in understanding the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. The best ESPs give you real-time tracking information and reports in easy-to-analyze visual formats. With this, you can figure out how many opens, hard and soft bounces, click-throughs and forwards your emails are getting. And if you use Benchmark Email, you can even compare different email campaigns side-by-side to see the progress you’re making in a single screen!

So it’s all very well to have nifty features, but if it doesn’t fit your wallet, none of what we’ve written above really matters. When choosing an email newsletter distribution service, you need to pick one that gives you enough value for your money with minimum investment up-front. Once you’ve checked out a particular service and are convinced about it, take the free one-month trial, which is more or less and industry standard. If you find it’s as useful and effective as it promised to be, that’s when you can loosen the purse strings. When compared with Bronto and Constant Contact, Benchmark Email offers various advantages; the lowest minimum monthly price, a free email archive, free online surveys and excellent customer support.

So the next time you’re looking for a good email newsletter distribution service, you’d do well to keep these features in mind.