Adventures in e-mail marketing

A writer's group I belong to wants to put on a conference this summer. Since I've written about two of the leading e-mail marketing services, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse, I volunteered to manage the messaging process and send out the e-mails. It's been interesting, meaning there's both good and bad details to report, but mostly good in that the messaging part of my job was pretty easy. The non-technical parts got a bit wonky, however, and I have three lessons to pass on.

When I reported on Constant Contact and VerticalResponse in the past, both offered me evaluation accounts for testing. So I flipped a coin to decide which to use for this effort and VerticalResponse won. The company uses a per-mailing cost structure, and lets you keep as many names in your database as you want. Constant Contact charges a flat monthly fee based on the number of names you have on your list rather than per mailing. If you have a single list you mail to regularly, Constant Contact's pricing may better. If you have many names and send mail to subgroups of that list, VerticalResonse may be less expensive. I've also heard good things about iContact. There are many options, so you can certainly find one message service that makes you feel at home.

Names are the most critical part of every e-mail campaign. Getting the names into the service was my first job. VerticalResponse wants the names in CSV (spreadsheet) or comma delimited format. Of course, people sent me the name lists in Word files, some with names and e-mail addresses, and some with just e-mail addresses.

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A writer's group I belong to wants to put on a conference this summer. Since I've written about two of the leading e-mail marketing services, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse, I volunteered to manage the messaging process and send out the e-mails. It's been interesting, meaning there's both good and bad details to report, but mostly good in that the messaging part of my job was pretty easy. The non-technical parts got a bit wonky, however, and I have three lessons to pass on.

When I reported on Constant Contact and VerticalResponse in the past, both offered me evaluation accounts for testing. So I flipped a coin to decide which to use for this effort and VerticalResponse won. The company uses a per-mailing cost structure, and lets you keep as many names in your database as you want. Constant Contact charges a flat monthly fee based on the number of names you have on your list rather than per mailing. If you have a single list you mail to regularly, Constant Contact's pricing may better. If you have many names and send mail to subgroups of that list, VerticalResonse may be less expensive. I've also heard good things about iContact. There are many options, so you can certainly find one message service that makes you feel at home.

Names are the most critical part of every e-mail campaign. Getting the names into the service was my first job. VerticalResponse wants the names in CSV (spreadsheet) or comma delimited format. Of course, people sent me the name lists in Word files, some with names and e-mail addresses, and some with just e-mail addresses.

Retyping the 291 names into the list database is possible, so I tried with a couple of names. The first one took a while to save, which I hoped was because of initialization processes. I guessed right, because the next two names saved quickly. But typing a list of more than a handful of names is a giant waste of time, so I got to work organizing the names for mass upload.

I use OpenOffice as my office productivity suite. To move the names to Calc, the OpenOffice spreadsheet, I made tables in the Writer program to separate the first and last names from the e-mail address in one file, and organize the e-mail addresses in the second file. From there, cutting and pasting the names into the spreadsheet was a snap, as was exporting the lists into two CSV files. Click the "upload file" button in the name management screen, and I'm done, right?

Wrong. This wasn't a problem with VerticalResponse, but a feature. One person sent me the names surrounded by greater-than and less-than symbols (such as <james@gaskin.com>). I searched and replaced those out of the DOC file, copied them into the spreadsheet, and exported a new CSV file. Things went great then.

Take that as Lesson One: keep your name list clean. Make sure the program you pull names from can export the names in a format your mailing list program can use. Focus on CSV beczuse it appears everybody takes that format.

Creating the message wasn't a problem. I had several options for message creation, including a range of free templates. Someone else wrote the copy, so I cut and paste that and dropped in a logo. The message editor was just as easy as a word processor.