If you search Google for E-mail marketing software you will find a lot of services and I’m sure a lot of them have great features and are worth the money. The pricing for 1000 mail messages is often very similar and most of them offer a back-end which makes it easy to setup a mailing list and marketing campaigns.

If all of them have similar features, how do choose the right one?

Some important features

• Creating a mailing list takes a lot of time and might be essential for your e-mail marketing success. While collecting subscribers and sending e-mail messages, it’s important that as many messages as possible have to reach the subscribers mailbox. Bigger companies are more trusted and invest more time an money to prevent that their mail servers are getting black-listed.
• If your list is not very big (~1000 subscriber) and you don’t have a lot of campaigns, your partner should offer pre-paid plans. If you take a monthly plan, check that the maximum amount of subscribers is not to big.
• If you’re not able to create all the forms and templates, you need a service provider which offer these features out of the box. If you have an international list or campaigns, multiple languages should be supported.
• A better service provider let you follow strict usage policies. If you need to create campaigns for your existing list, check if the list is fully accepted (before you start customizing forms and templates). On the other side, if the service provider accept any kind of mailing list and or campaign, it might be possible that their mail servers are black-listed frequently.
• All services should offer double opt-in features for your subscriptions. Check if you are able to send an auto-respond message to your subscribers.

In the past year I was able to try three of the bigger services; iContact, MailChimp and CampaignMonitor. AWeber looks pretty good and earns a lot of trust and I’m sure you will not waste your time if you try them as well. They don’t offer a free trial, but at the moment while I’m writing this review they offer the first month for only $1 ($19 for the following months).

iContact – E-mail marketing simplified

I tried iContact first a year ago and actually it works as they offer the service on their website. You can open a trial account to setup your mailing list and templates/forms. If you want to import a bigger list you need to pay first. They offer only monthly plans, “pay as you go” options are not possible. They have all the features like other professional companies, but it seems if their application is not updated the last 3 years (the WYSIWYG editor is very ugly). It doesn’t feel like a web application from these days. Every e-mail gets the iContact logo in the footer, which you can’t remove. I have the idea that they don’t have a strong usage policy because I got never complains for high percentage of un-subscriptions, bounce rates and complains. They offer a survey function and support several 3rd party plugins (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SalesForce…)

MailChimp – Email Marketing and Email List Manager

MailChimp is the best service for a beginning mailing list, because they offer a free plan for lists with less than 500 subscribers. They offering great and easy to use tools for creating lists and campaigns. With a lot of 3rd party plugins (Facebook, SalesForce, Magento, Paypal and many more) they are one of the biggest email marketing partners. Using MailChimp you can go for monthly pricing or “pay as you go”. The last option is for people sending less frequently a newsletter to their members. Another features are: Custom responder messages, complete forms for your website, powerful API system (offering complete example code), Google Analytics integration, advanced reports and much more. They have a very strict policy on abusing their system, will say don’t use them for a mailing list you have bought somewhere on the Internet. Very unique is their affiliate scheme, if someone has joined MailChimp via your affiliate link and the user has upgraded to a paid account, both parties getting a $30 bonus (new user and the affiliate). You can’t turn this bonus into cash, but maybe is an opportunity to run your (bigger) mailing list for free.

CampaignMonitor – Email marketing software for web designers

The first thing you will notice after free trial sign-up is that you login into some kind of reseller area. With CampaignMonitor it’s possible to create mailing lists completely white-label (even for the user of the back-end). Against MailChimp the back-end has less features, but you’re able to create your campaigns with custom templates or using the premium templates offered by CampaignMonitor. They offer monthly and “pay as you go” plans and their usage policy is somewhere between the one from iContact and the policy from MailChimp. While their back-end is very modern and functional, they don’t offer enough features for lists in languages other than English. If you need to setup your list in a different language, you should try the API which is powerful as well.

If you start a new mailing list, most of the products or services should work for you, but if you need a provider for your existing list you need to test them first.
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MailChimp is a great mailing list provider with a great control panel and many useful features like: campaign management, statistics, responders and complete set of List management tools. They offer also an small code snippet to place a subscription form on your website. This form powered by jQuery is good enough for most common cases, but what if you like to combine your newsletter subscription with a standard function like contact or registration form?

The secret to make your list bigger is to integrate the opt-in function with often used functions like a registration or contact form.

In our tutorial we showcase how-to create a contact form application which will send a message and subscribes the user to a mailing list hosted by MailChimp.

Preparations

• If you don’t have a MailChimp account, register one at MailChimp. They offer a free account for the first 500 mailing list members and for 3.000 messages a month. Sign-up now for free and get a $30 bonus if you upgrade your account after a while.
• Setup a mailing list via the MailChimp control panel and obtain the Unique list ID (via the list settings page, lower left corner).
• Now we need an MailChimp API Key, create one from the control panel (Account -> API Keys & Info)
• As an option create a custom field (List settings -> List Fields and *|MERGE|* Tags) and name it subscription_via. Don’t change the other variables. We use this field to store the information that a subscription is done via the contact form we create.

The contact form (html)

We need to have a simple contact form, with a field for name and e-mail address, a textarea for the message and a checkbox for the subscription. The following example is very basic for a better understanding. In real you might to use some Ajax/jQuery powered form (check the jQuery form plugin listed below).

<form action="process.php" method="post">
	<div>
		<label for="name">Name</label>
		<input type="text" value="" name="name" />
	</div>
	<div>
		<label for="email">E-mail</label>
		<input type="text" value="" name="email" />
	</div>
	<div>
		<label for="message">Message</label>
		<textarea name="message" cols="30" rows="4"></textarea>
	</div>
	<div>
		<input type="checkbox" value="yes" name="newsletter" />
		<label for="newsletter">Subscribe to newsletter</label>
	</div>
	<div>
		<input type="submit" value="Register" name="subscribe" />
	</div>
</form>

Using the MailChimp API with cURL

The MailChimp API has several modes on how-to communicate with the system. In this tutorial we use the simple HTTP GET/POST URL method. We request the data using cURL functions and we like to have a response which is a JSON array.

$apikey = 'Your API Key';
$listID = 'Your List';
$url = sprintf('http://api.mailchimp.com/1.2/?method=listSubscribe&apikey=%s&id=%s&email_address=%s&merge_vars[OPTINIP]=%s&merge_vars[MMERGE1]=webdev_tutorials&output=json', $apikey, $listID, $email, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch); ID';

You can see that we created a string using the PHP function sprintf to add our variables. You need to use at least one merge variable, in this example we submit the users IP and a value for the custom field we created before. After the cURL request is done we get a response called $data, the JSON array.

This so far about the communication. Before we submit any data we need to check if the submitted email address is valid. I the email address is valid we send the message.

	if (preg_match("(\w[-._\w]*\w@\w[-._\w]*\w\.\w{2,})", $_POST['email'])) {
		$email = $_POST['email'];
		//
		// process here the contact form data like name and message
		mail('your@mail.com', 'Subject: contact form', $_POST['message']); // example
		//

Note this is just an e-mail example, nothing special because how-to create a safe contact or mail form is not part of this tutorial. We posted a few resources at the end from this article.

Putting all stuff together

After the e-mail address is validated and the message is send we check if the checkbox was checked to send the data to the MailChimp API. Here is the complete script for the file process.php.

<?php
$apikey = 'Your API Key';
$listID = 'Your List';
 
if (isset($_POST['subscribe'])) {
	if (preg_match("(\w[-._\w]*\w@\w[-._\w]*\w\.\w{2,})", $_POST['email'])) {
		$email = $_POST['email'];
		//
		// process here the contact form data like name and message
		mail('your@mail.com', 'Subject: contact form', $_POST['message']); // example
		//
		if (!empty($_POST['newsletter'])) {
			$url = sprintf('http://api.mailchimp.com/1.2/?method=listSubscribe&apikey=%s&id=%s&email_address=%s&merge_vars[OPTINIP]=%s&merge_vars[MMERGE1]=webdev_tutorials&output=json', $apikey, $listID, $email, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
			$ch = curl_init($url);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
			$data = curl_exec($ch);
			curl_close($ch);
			$arr = json_decode($data, true);
			if ($arr == 1) {
				echo 'Check now your e-mail and confirm your subsciption.';
			} else {
				switch ($arr['code']) {
					case 214:
					echo 'You are already subscribed.';
					break;
					// check the MailChimp API for more options
					default:
					echo 'Unkown error...';
					break;			
				}
			}
		}
	}
}
?>

We’re using the PHP function json_decode to convert the JSON array into a PHP array and echo different messages upon the result. We used the most common results:

• 1 (not an array) = conformation mail is send
• code 214 = the submitted email address already exists
• By default we use a standard message

Using the API this way it’s possible to have your own (translated) messages. If you like to use more different messages for different response codes, just add them into the switch statement.

Additional resources

• A (safe) contact form using Xajax and PHPmailer
• jQuery plugin for forms

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• jQuery Contact form for your website
• jQuery form plugin and PHP file uploads
• Your e-mail address hidden with jQuery?

Internet marketing Guru’s swear by them, and you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “the money’s in the list” more times than you care to acknowledge. Certainly running an email list can be lucrative, but why is it so lucrative, and how can you build a mailing list that not only increases sales, but increases your website traffic as well?

Why running a mailing list can increase sales

It’s statistically proven that on average a person must be exposed to a website or offer 7 times before they’ll make a purchase. While the underlying reason for this fact is not as clear as the “magic number” itself, running a mailing list allows you to keep your primary offer in front of perspective buyers until they purchase or they unsubscribe from your list.

Of course, a mailing list that is sent to potential consumers that is blatantly sales-focused will undoubtedly suffer from a high unsubscribe rate. Giving your potential customers value amongst subtle recommendations is a much better practice than blasting advertisements with no real value to their email inbox every other day. Get to know your subscribers and know what kind of questions that they are asking; if you cater to their needs with free information or free resources, over time they will learn to trust your insight and will be more likely to act (purchase a product or service) based on your recommendation alone.

Running an email list can increase website traffic

This fact is directly related to what we shared above; giving your email list subscribers value. You don’t have to give away the farm, so to speak, in order to give value to your email list, simply by knowing they type of information that your subscribers are looking for and providing the answers to their questions without coming across as trying to get into their wallets will undoubtedly help to increase trust in your relationship.

As your mailing list grows, you’ll see the positive effects of your relationship with your mailing list. Not only will this help to increase sales for your personal products and products or services that you are promoting as an affiliate, you’ll notice that your subscribers will frequent your website more often, undoubtedly looking for more insight that you’ve proven that you can give.

Creating a profitable mailing list

People who initially subscribe to your email list do so with the assumption that you have something valuable to provide them. They are looking for answers, and they think that you have the solution. By catering to the needs of your mailing list subscribers, you are establishing a name for yourself where you are seen as helpful and trustworthy. When you’ve established yourself as a helpful and trustworthy individual, people will naturally pay close attention to what you have to say. When people are listening closely, they’ll receive your suggestions for a certain product or service as advice given from a trusted friend, thus much more likely to buy a product or service than if they’re casually browsing a website.

Running an email list is really like starting a relationship with somebody. Successful relationships are not all about giving advice; they’re about listening to what your friend has to say. Undoubtedly, if you take the time to listen to what your subscribers are asking, you’ll build a solid relationship with them, and at that point you will be able to say from firsthand knowledge that the money is, in fact, in the list.Similar Posts:

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