What's the difference between email you send to your friends and family and the email you send out in bulk to your customers?
Constant Contact is one of the popular, easy to use email newsletter management systems. They provide colorful email templates that you can manipulate and turn into beautiful masterpieces of email creativity.
Perhaps you sit and marvel at the beauty of those email newsletters before sending, only to have your excitement crushed by those built in statistics that show how few people open the email (called open rates).
There are many reasons for low open rates, including spam filters, firewalls, poor subject lines, and customers who don't view images in email. You can only track when an email is opened if the person views images. Have you ever see that "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here" message at the top of an email? If you click it, you will view the images and it counts toward the open rates.
There is a large debate between different internet marketing experts on the value of Constant Contact or other companies like them. Email viruses can be spread through the same process as loading images so email programs by default prevent images from loading now as a way to protect the user. This built in protection causes an automatic user distrust of all received emails.
Think about it for a moment. When you get emails that have garbled nonsense or broken images do you automatically trust the email or do you suspect it might be spam or a virus?
We are among a growing number of professional internet marketing companies that believe there needs to be a migration away from fancy formatted emails like those from Constant Contact. From 2003 - 2009 it was really wonderful to track the correct open rates of newsletter emails. Today, the effort to create fancy email newsletters could be better spent coming up with normal emails that engage users to interact with you on a social network.
So what is the difference between an email you send your friends and family compared to one you send your clients? The answer is that you would not spend hours working on a fancy formatted email to send your friends; you would simply open your email program and start typing. Sometimes you will insert an image, but otherwise it's just a simple text email that they can read without loading images.
Newsletters are for "everyone" but if your current email marketing has little or no return then it's time to change it up. In the next day or so we'll give you some ideas how you can build your email marketing list and target them as individual friends instead of a single group of "everyone."
