This post is the 3rd post in a series about what is holding people back from becoming successful at Online marketing. You can follow this series by visiting here
What email program should You use?
If you have been online for more than 5 minutes, you might have heard of things like CRMs, or customer relationship management systems, where there is a full database tool, or maybe things like MailChimp, or AWeber, or email marketing programs. But the question we get often is “What email program should You use?”
Then there are also forms that you can stick on your website or your “contact us” page and there’s confusion about what functionality they have. Some people say ” oh I have a contact form on my website; how do I communicate with those people?”
A lot of contact forms just send the data straight over to you via an email. They don’t actually collect it and store it anywhere.
So the biggest question that we get from business owners is, “What email program should I use if I’m just starting or if I’m not making money?,
Should you use something easy like MailChimp or tackle something more intricate like Infusionsoft?
Keep in mind that your contact forms on your contact page don’t add people to a newsletter list generally. It’s a different system. So if somebody’s contacting you on your contact form, you want to add them on to a list that you can access at a later date.
For CRMs like ONTRAPORT, Infusionsoft, the more crazy systems — don’t worry about those until later. We were just was talking to a guy yesterday who has Infusionsoft and has no idea how to use it and has no idea why he even brought it, because he has a brand new website. It was an overkill for what he needed at the time
We talk about this a lot. People will come to us and they will say “I just want to send emails, so should I buy Infusionsoft?”
That’s like buying a Ferrari to drive across the road to buy milk. That is all you’re going to use your Ferrari for — to drive across the street. You don’t need a Ferrari to do that. You can spend a lot less money on something that does the job until you’re ready to use that Ferrari down the track.
There are two things you will want to look at when it comes to email systems: Broadcasts and Autoresponders.
With a modern day marketing platform, you’re able to do what is called a “broadcast,” or a campaign where it’s like a newsletter. We have a list of people that have come into your email platform; you can manually add them or they can come in from a form on your website and you send them a newsletter.
Basically you are saying “I have a special voucher I want to give them, I have content that I want to release” — that would be a campaign.
These type of emails are sent out to EVERYONE at the same time, regardless of the time that they joined your list
The other thing that you are going to want to have in your email program is autoresponders which is automation, which is “nurture sequences.”
If somebody signs up for your newsletter or whatever your freebie or your lead magnet is that you give them, then you’re going to want to have some autoresponders that sort of “talk” to them in the first couple of weeks with good content to nurture them and get them up to speed about your brand.
Most modern day email platforms allow you to do that. You want to be using both of those as well.
In this case, the autoresponders will be sent to each person dependent on the time and date that they joined your list.
What is the price point difference between MailChimp, and other comparable services?
Infusionsoft — and ONTRAPORT which is what we use — those big boys are around $300 a month. MailChimp is free until you want to use the automation. Then at that point it’s like $20 a month for 100 subscribers or it’s under 12000 emails
There’s one that sits in the middle called Active Campaign. Active Campaign has a price point of $50 per month and it does a lot more fancy automation in there. But if you’re just getting started, you want to have nurture sequences and newsletters; MailChimp is a really cool place to start.
We love to hear about the different email programs our readers like to use, so let us know in the comments What email program do you use?
In the next post, we are going to investigate the common problem of ” Don’t understand keywords or SEO .”