Communicating on a Budget: Low Cost E-marketing Campaign Managers

15Sep10

To follow from Liam Barrington-Bush’s recent blog about e-campaigning on a [non existent budget], today our ‘communicating on a budget’ series will look at low cost e-marketing campaign managers.

E- marketing is a form of direct marketing – using email to communicate messages to an audience.  It is low cost and (if done well) can be effective, but why would you use an e-marketing campaign manager rather than sending standard emails from platforms such as outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc?

Here’s why you may consider an e-marketing campaign manager:

You can create attractive, eye catching emails
You can create attractive HTML emails (with pictures and links) alongside plain text alternative versions, and most campaigns are created with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, so it means that you don’t have to know lots of fiddly html code either.

It’s easy to personalise
Personalisation of your marketing messages is a way to help build relationships with you audiences.  It’s quite tedious to try and personalise bulk emails using something like outlook (I know because I’ve tried!), but an e-marketing campaign manager will allow you to effectively personalise your campaigns by basically creating a mail merge online. You can also include opt-in and opt-out functions to your mailings , and functions whereby your reader can forward to a friend or update their details.

It’s Measurable
Campaign managers allow you to check the effectiveness of your email by monitoring who opens your emails and which links they click.  It also helps you to manage your contacts by reporting on the number of  “soft bounces” (i.e. out of office replies) or “hard bounces” (i.e. email address no longer in use) that you receive.  Most will also allow you to compare reports and effectiveness of archived campaigns.

It’s Time Effective
Email communication is quick to set up and is instant in its delivery (no postal strikes!) – plus you can usually time your campaign to send at a specific time / day.  Email is global and it’s 24 hour.

It can be Cost Effective
Sending an e-marketing campaign is also very cost effective.  As you can see with the examples below, there are free offers out there (although sending options can be limited), and there are also many other platforms that offer a variety of different pricing options.

Considerations

However, you should also take into account:

• The high “noise to action” ratio of email communications (people receive a lot of email during the course of a day – much of which gets forgotten about / ignored)
• Data protection – make sure you aren’t spamming people! (read the Email Marketing Council’s best practice guidelines here)
• You won’t be able to communicate with people who have no access to the internet

Free or low cost E-Marketing Campaign Managers

These are platforms that we have either stumbled across, or that have been recommended to us (following our Twitter plea). We haven’t actually tested any of these platforms so if you have any feedback please leave it below.

MailChimp
This system caught our collective eye as it seemed quite a generous free offering, allowing users to send up to 3,000 emails per month to up to 500 contacts for free.  Forever.  This is just perfect for a smaller organisation with a limited communications budget.  If you wish to send more than this there are various fee bands to choose from.

Charity Technology Trust
‘A simple and affordable, yet powerful charities’ email marketing tool used to send email newsletters, appeals, campaigns, updates and notifications’.  There is an initial £100 set up fee, and there are several payment bands to choose from (for example you can set an allowance of 5,000 emails at a cost of £45 per month).  However, CTT also offers telephone support (Mon – Fri, 9-5), and free training for staff using the system.

Charity Email
No set up fee for professional edition and no charge for support, and you are only charged the monthly fee depending on how many emails you send that month.  For example, if you don’t send any emails there is no charge.  There are several fee bands to choose from (for example, 100 emails per month will cost £10, £500 emails will cost £15 etc etc).

EKM Response
A recommendation from the Chain Reaction community, this system has a free sign up and offer a free service for up to 100 contacts, and a charging structure if you have more contacts than this. All packages (free and paid for) have unlimited emails but are subject to a fair usage policy.

Dotmailer
Another recommendation from the Chain Reaction community, although this doesn’t seem to be the cheapest option around – there is an initial set up fee of £99 for a professional account that requires a minimum spend of £49 per month (see prices)

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive and there are many other organisations that can help with email marketing – so if you know of any please add them in the comments field below. Also, see this extensive list from the Direct Marketing Association.

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Tags: charity email, charity technology trust, cheap, communication, dotmailer, e-marketing, ekm response, free, low-cost, mailchimp, marketing, not for profits, on a budget, resources