Today, the days of sending out flyers in mails and cold calling is not as effective as it used to be. A better way to get leads and increase sales is through email marketing. Every successful business utilizes some form of email marketing to drive sales.
If you do a search online, you can find many email marketing systems. There are free and paid email marketing software to choose from. Before you decide whether to pay for the system, it is important that you check the features first. The features of a free system are not the same as a paid system. Free systems have very limited features which may affect your campaigns in the near future.
Many software programs offer a free trial. You should sign up for the free trial and try the system. This allows you to explore all the included features before you make any decision. In this article, let me share with you a few important features that you should look out for:
1. Personalization. You should be able to personalize your emails with first name. This is very important because a cold email will get not get your subscribers' attention.
2. Reporting. You should be able to generate reports to track important numbers like open rate, click through rate and delivery status. Reports allow you to know how successful your campaign is.
3. Able to send HTML email. HTML emails allow more customization and can better engage your subscribers. HTML emails with images and links are much better received too. The system should allow you to upload your own HTML template and send HTML emails.
4. Find out how many emails can the software send at one time. If your list is huge, you need to ensure that the system is able to handle the delivery.
5. When you upload your own list, does the system require subscribers to re-confirm their subscription? If they need to re-confirm their subscription again, you must be prepared to lose some subscribers.
6. What kinds of support do the company provides? Do they provide only email or phone support? If you need an onsite demo or support, will the company be able to do it?
7. The system needs to support international characters. International character support is important when your email campaigns are going abroad.
Make sure you do a thorough research before you decide to use a particular system. Choosing the wrong system may cause you a lot of unnecessary problems in the future.
Author Resource:-
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency that specializes in search engine marketing and email marketing.
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