Everyone hates getting unsolicited e-mails offering dubious body-enhancing products and fake brand-name watches. But when a customer entrusts you with their e-mail address, you know that an e-mail from your store will be welcome. This type of permission-based e-mail marketing is the latest thing in advertising: an expensive way to keep in touch regularly with your best customers.

Our e-mail newsletter used to be made up entirely of typed text, which was not very impressive – and without graphics, it was an inefficient way to present information about visually appealing merchandise. I was also spending way too much time managing our long e-mail list, deleting “unsubscribes” and adding addresses.

But then I discovered that there are e-mail newsletter marketing services that make both the creating of the newsletter and the managing of the e-mail list quick and efficient – and at a low cost. Good news!

We started looking at the bottom of attractive e-mail newsletters that we received to see which marketing service was being used. We eventually decided to use Constant Contact, but another close contender was My Emma.

Both of these services – and there are undoubtedly others like them – have you upload your mailing list so that they can send out your mailings for you, and they manage changes to the list. They provide a range of templates that make creating colorful newsletters and invitations easy, and also offer to “store” graphics for you on their server so that you can upload your own illustrations. (Paying for extra storage means you can look at past newsletters with their graphics still in place.)

The monthly fee for the e-mail marketing service is really a bargain, in my opinion. You can use it as often as you want to send out a mailing, although I feel that customers – even those who have given you permission – don’t want to hear from you more than once a month. You want an e-mail from your store to always be a welcome event!

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder