Web Business Marketing Blog

With an email marketing campaign, users opt-in to your mailing list. Based on your ‘contract with the user’, you can now enter in a regular dialog, sending electronic newsletters or flash alerts. All it requires is a subscription form, a mailing server, a newsletter template and some collateral, explaining your privacy policy, the content of your newsletter and a confirmation page. Sounds pretty straightforward.

Enter ConstantContact

So we started a couple of years ago with Constant Contact (CC). CC’s cost is trivial for most b2b marketing budgets, it comes with a wide number of built-in templates, allows to maintain multiple mailing lists, and gives good campaign metrics.

But CC allows only a single subscription form. With the requests from our organisation, we experienced a proliferation of lists:

• we started to segment lists per topic
• countries wanted to have their own lists
• some country managers wanted to segment per target group (technical, commercial)
• we needed lists for specific content streams, e.g. webinars, blog

Very quickly, the subscription form became chaotic. Users do not want to see lots of list options that are irrelevant to them. Moreover, CC did not allow to combine lists for targeting emarketing campaigns. Still CC served us well up to end of 2005 for about 100 e-mail campaigns.

Enter PHPList

Next comes PHP List (PL), an open-source application that can be installed on a PHP/MySQL server. PL allows multiple mailing lists, multiple subscription forms, and highly targeted campaigns, combining several user attributes in complex combinations.

But PL is the DIY (do-it-yourself) version of e-mail marketing. The user interface is a bit less engineered, it does not work well if you need collaborative editing (unless you only have highly disciplined computer users), and there is no technical support for the system. Unless you have an adequate webmaster to strongly support you, PL makes the B2B marketeer’s life a bit less comfortable than it should be. Marketing people should focus on using web-based tools, not on configuring/tweaking them.

Going over the top: Newsweaver

So from summer 2006, we went probably a bit over the top to the other extreme, and started using Newsweaver (NW). This is a Rolls Royce among marketing systems. It allows targeted campaigns and multiple subscription form. Every campaign is published as a small mini-website on which you can track visit statistics. Any article ever written is stored in a database, for future re-use at the click of a button.

NW is a bit overwhelming in its use, but has a capable and responsive team to support you.

With NW, one can do almost anything one can imagine in e-mail marketing, except one thing: rss-to-email newsletters.

But why would one ever want to produce email newsletters based on rss feeds? Wouldn’t that be a step back? Aren’t feeds designed to be traced in rss readers?

Unfortunately, the sad truth in my industry is that nobody knows rss. I did a quick tour of the office, and over 90% had never heard of it. So we need rss-based newsletters for a while, for those users who are not yet using rss.

Enter AWeber

Via Problogger, I learned about AWeber (AW). AW is a fantastic system for an unbelievable price. It gives multiple lists, multiple subscription forms, targeted campaigns, but best of all, it allows blog broadcasts, i.e. send users a digest of up to 20 posts on your blog.

Conclusion

Having come a long way in 3.5 years, almost 200 campaigns and close to a million e-mails, we’ll stick with the combination Newsweaver/AWeber for a while. If you’re on a tight budget though, you’ll have to search very hard to do better than AWeber.

Good luck.