Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Does anyone know of a good eNewsletter site out there?  I want to start my first newsletter mailing and want to look professional as I can.  I would need one which has places to input picture files and links to my site.

Thanks

Jason

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Jason Dunn
Owner - Tight Five Rugby
248-410-3235
www.tightfiverugby.com
tightfiverugby@wideopenwest.com

the best News letter software that I know out there is called constant contact

at http://www.constantcontact.com

 

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

I don`t know if Constant Contact is the best, but for the price, it is a good value - IMHO. I use it for several clients and the online standard template versions work well and it is pretty easy to set up, even for a beginner. I would recommend it as a starter. Keep in mind, they will - for a fee - do custom design work so your newsletter is different than their standard templates and the fee is inline with going rates - maybe even a little less.

Plus, you can try it for 30 days FREE - what a deal!

R@

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Richard Arnold · Key Concept Writers · Business Communication: The "Key" To Success· Law of Attraction Blog · Life Ain`t Brain Surgery Blog

I just signed up for Emma (www.myemma.com).  It`s pricey ($250 for your template), but I was so impressed with their back-end stats.  I can focus my marketing efforts like a lazer beam because I know exactly WHO clicked what.  The stats and the data base info I can store is what sold me on it despite the price. 

~Kim

ScrapBiz

You can acheive the same with constant contact. As for myself I create my own templates with dreamweaver and then upload it to constant contact. It works good and it`s not that pricey.

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

Jay,

I`ve used Constant Contact before and I agree with Edgar that it`s a great solution for starting off.  They have some pre-made, effective templates from which to choose that you can then customize (logo, colors, etc).  It`s very simple to add a sign-up form to your website and they offer some good stats on Opens and Click-throughs. 

I believe they have a demo that you can watch and possibly and demo account to try it out.

 

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Brian Cleveland,
Web Producer,
StartupNation

I found this article interesting ... they studied user`s behaviors with regards to newsletters.

Linky loo

I particularly liked the eye tracking software image about halfway down the page ... neat!

I don`t sign up for e-mail newsletters. As I mentioned in a recent blog entry, I have several thousand emails in my inbox. And as of right now ... well I`m almost embarrassed to say how many mailboxes I have in my Eudora.

So when someone has a newsletter and only offers e-mail subscriptions, I pass 99% of the time. I mean, it would have to be something REALLY GOOD for me to read it and sign up for it. I think every time I sign up for an e-mail newsletter, I end up opting-out within a few months. And the few I do read, like SUN ... they don`t appear right in my email so I end up just clicking that link to let me read them online. For the most part, if I can`t read it in NewsFire, I`m not going to read it.

What`s the point of this random rambling? The internet is about choices. You shouldn`t just offer e-mail newsletters ... give people an RSS feed of your newsletter through a company like Feedburner so that your readers can sign up through email, feed readers, MyYahoo!, or whatever. I know the "point" of a lot of newsletter signups is this notion of "building your list". But if you goal is a quality product, more choices = more subscribers. It took me less than an hour yesterday to set up one of my clients with a hidden WordPress blog that was connected to Feedburner. You can even completely modify the display of WordPress so that you can post newsletter archives to your site as well, thereby generating search engine traffic with your content.

I have to ask though ... do other people feel this way about signing up for e-mail newsletters? I do have quite a few people who chose to subscribe to my article/blog site via email, so obviously they aren`t as against e-mail newsletters as I am.

I figure if I need to know something, I`ll go look for it at that point. I don`t particularly prefer "push" technology. I`m more into "pull" technology.

Yeah that`s what I`m saying.

I load my NewsFire with a bunch of trusted sources ... my favorite RSS feeds ... and when I want to go look for the latest from them, I go look.

If it`s in my e-mail, I`m never going to find it or read it anyway.