DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

The concept of email marketing has come a long way since its humble beginnings and having worked in the space I know there is wide variety in quality when it comes to the selection of a a good Email Service Provider. Many times I have seen people compromise the deliverability of their email in favour of keeping costs down. Obviously if you invest your time, energy and dollars into building a list and putting a newsletter together, it makes sense that you are getting good levels of deliverabilty. My favourite analogy to explain this is stolen from the direct mail days. Imagine you went to the expense of acquiring a list, doing the creative, printing and fulfilling then the postman only delivered 30% of your campaign. Would that be acceptable to you? Probably not so it shouldn’t be acceptable online either.

Early systems were focussed mainly on simply getting the message out (or email blasting), where as the next generation of ESP’s recognised that with so much competition in the inbox, its important to send more personalised messaging in order for your message to get read. So a good ESP will provide the facility to segment and target a message and be more conversational.

My current ESP of choice is Aweber largely due to the cost but also because it delivers all the features of a next generation system. In addition to list segmentation, great delivery and reporting, Aweber comes with some neat additional features…
Blog broadcast – Subscribers to my blog will know that I offer a weekly digest of my blogposts. This is all taken care of by Aweber automatically which I love.

Email to Twitter – Bloggers or companies who love the twitter phenominan will be interested to know that posts cam be published to a feed in Aweber and inturn syndicated to your twitter account. So basically, your newsletters can be read by your twitter followers too.

Readers of DaveBirchall.com are able to try Aweber for themselves by visiting the following link.

Best of all you can set up and get started in less than five minutes.

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