A comparison of MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber & other solid choices

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, community organizations, educators, marketers, Web publishers.

Guest post by Sarah Boisvert

Email is now standard communication for all but the smallest nonprofits and businesses. Why? Because it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to market your products and services.

But for email marketing to be effective, the process is so complex it’s not easy to go it alone. Success in the 21st century requires that you use a service that can simplify and automate email marketing tasks, from one-off communications to regular e-newsletters.

Choosing the best mail service for your nonprofit, organization or business is not a simple task, given all the options available today. So here’s a rundown of some (but not all) of the major email marketing services that you should consider, whether you’re just starting out or thinking about a change.

MailChimp: Low cost and easy targeting

One of the most popular email services I came across is MailChimp. I found it attractive because it is so easy to target emails to a specific group. Unlike some of its competitors, it has a mobile app for Android and iOS. And it also comes with a nice analytics feature, which allows me to track sales I make in order to evaluate the effectiveness of my email-marketing program.

Analytics are important because we tend to believe whatever set of figures are most convenient. Looking at cold, hard numbers dispels those biases and keeps us on track as a data-informed organization.

MailChimp may be so popular because they offer a free version that gives you up to 12,000 emails per month to as many as 2,000 subscribers. You can also upgrade to paid programs with increased features for $10 to $15 per month. One of the major reasons to upgrade is a great feature to test emails to determine why they are being rejected as spam. This function highly automates the time and energy it would take to do this by hand, individually testing each variable. MailChimp also offers a guide for nonprofits worth checking out.

Don’t end your search with MailChimp, though. Here are some more expensive email services that provide increased functionality.

Constant Contact: Event management meets marketing

Constant Contact is the granddaddy of email service providers. Although I had used the service a few years ago, I wanted to see how it had evolved.

A great new feature is the ability to target specific types of publicity campaigns, such as social change efforts and donations for social causes. Another recent Constant Contact improvement is the ability to support discount codes for events and to even limit the number of times one person can download a code.

The sophistication of Constant Contact means that it’s not inexpensive. Fees range from $15/month to $75/month. Plus the service does not offer a free version, although you can sign up for a free trial period to test-drive it. Constant Contact offers a 20 to 30 percent discount for nonprofits.

Aweber: Strong customer support is a central appeal

Prominent people in my industry recommended an email service called Aweber. What I noticed right away is that Aweber is an excellent email service for people who are focused on getting subscribers to sign up for a newsletter or other product. It allows for a seamless interaction between a product creator and those people who are looking for information about the product.

Pricing for Aweber runs from $10 to $130 per month. The service’s unusually strong customer support program makes up for the higher price. How often do we see photos of the people providing customer service? This aspect of the program is particularly refreshing. For nonprofits, Aweber provides the first three months free and a 25 percent discount thereafter.

SendGrid: Customization is the key value add

A newer email service I came across is called SendGrid. You’ve likely heard of some of SendGrid’s clients, including Pinterest, Foursquare, Spotify, HootSuite, Pandora and Uber.

SendGrid works especially well for organizations who looking to customize their email messages to a greater extent than is usually available. SendGrid is a great email solution for a business with a heavy emphasis on customization of its software, for example. Prices for SendGrid start at $9.95/month and go up to as high as $400 per month.

HubSpot: Track analytics to ensure your campaign is working

HubSpot provides users with an email tool that helps organizations easily create messages that are both aesthetically pleasing and coldly analytical. Users can create email templates to be used over and over again; these templates are customizable, too, so your nonprofit can get exactly what it needs. And it has mobile versions for Android and iOS.

HubSpot allows you to track analytics that can help you figure out how to get more out of your email marketing campaigns — check out the success stories of businesses and nonprofits that have used HubSpot. (Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity is among the Socialbrite clients that uses HubSpot.)

The email marketing packages are a little challenging to figure out. There’s the Basic plan ($200/month), the Premium plan ($600/month) and the Enterprise plan ($1,000/month), each of which comes with its own set of features. Then you must add the number of contacts in your email lists with the new leads you annually generate from your website; each 1,000 contacts will cost you $100. Finally, you’re given your price, which can range from $200 to well above that. But the good news is that HubSpot offers a free 30-day trial, so you’ll have the chance to decide if it’s right for you. Contact HubSpot for Nonprofits for special rates.

Vertical Response: 700 templates, sign-up forms & real-time results

The most attractive feature of Vertical Response is its ease of use. The whole process is pretty simple: You just create the email you’d like to send out, send it to your lists and then you can use the provided analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.

Vertical Response provides users with more than 700 customizable email templates to work off of, sign-up forms that can be posted online to expand your list of email contacts, real-time results reporting with detailed info such as the number of opens and clicks, and easy-to-access customer service. It also has a mobile app for iOS.

In a nifty move, Vertical Response gives nonprofits up to 10,000 emails to send out for free each month! Vertical Response may be best for small and mid-size nonprofits, new startups or businesses on a tight budget, as it offers pay-as-you-go pricing. The service can cost anywhere from $0.02 (for one email contact) to $3,750 (to manage a half million email contacts). You can also opt for one of their monthly plans.

That’s our roundup of some of the top email service tools to enhance your organization’s email marketing campaigns.

Do you have a favorite email service for your list? Why do you like it?

Related

• 9 powerful, simple ways to build your email list (Socialbrite)

• How to use your Facebook page to build your nonprofit’s email list (Socialbrite)

• 5 easy ways to integrate email marketing and Facebook (Socialbrite)

• How to create an email drip campaign for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

The post 6 email marketing services to build your list appeared first on Socialbrite.

6 tips to keep your content top-of-stream

Guest post by Meghan Keaney Anderson
Hubspot

In late September news trickled out about a change in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that was causing big drops in reach for many branded pages for nonprofits, businesses and all organizations. The EdgeRank algorithm determines which posts are displayed in the newsfeed and in what priority order. Noticing a clear decrease in the reach and virality of pages, Beth Kanter took to Facebook to see if many nonprofits had experienced it. She received a number of replies affirming the dropoff, while others, like John Haydon at Socialbrite, say the evidence doesn’t support that claim.

What seems to have changed?

Both EdgeRank Checker and Post Rocket have good posts on the details, but in a nutshell, Facebook has altered the way it displays posts in the newsfeed to prioritize posts that have the greatest number of interactions – a cumulative figure determined by the number of clicks, likes, comments and shares a post receives. The new algorithm also factors in negative feedback and penalizes posts that have been actively hidden by viewers or reported as spam.

Regardless of whether Facebook’s code tweaking is having an impact on your fans’ newsfeeds, the real question now is: Short of paying for promoted posts, what can nonprofits do to adjust to these changes and make sure their content earns the sort of reach and virality needed to engage new volunteers, donors and advocates? Here are a few tips to keep in mind to help your content remain top-of-stream.

Audit your content

1The major point that emerges from Facebook’s explanation of the new algorithm is that posts with the most positive engagement in the form of clicks, likes, comments and shares will appear more often in the newsfeed, resulting in higher reach and virality. This could be a good thing for Facebook users. As more and more brands have ramped up their presence on Facebook, the newsfeed has become increasingly cluttered with content. The algorithm change was designed, at least in part, to reduce the noise in an individual’s newsfeed and give more prominence to really good content.

How to leverage it: Take 30 minutes to audit your content that has done well in the past on Facebook. Put your top content through each of the following questions and see where trends emerge.

• What common traits do the posts have in terms of subject matter or format?
• What tone did each of your top shares have? Were they urgent? Funny? Or did they raise questions for response?
• What was the call to action, if any? In her recent book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” Beth Kanter talks about a ladder of engagement, with smaller actions laying the foundation for larger ones. Where in the ladder of engagement would you place the calls to action of your top posts?

Once you have laid out your top posts and examined their tone, content and format, use any themes that emerged to map out your future posts.

Post at the optimal time to drive activity

2Because so much of the new algorithm depends on early activity, timing is just as important as content. In 2011, HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella conducted extensive research on the topic of social media timing. He studied more than 1.3 million posts from the 10,000 most-Liked Facebook pages to glean some larger trends in the timing of social shares. What he found for Facebook was that shares on average had the highest rate of activity during the weekend. It’s easy to forget about posting on weekends, but weekends are prime-time for engagement with newsfeed posts. Many offices still block Facebook during the workweek. Even for those who allow it, the weekend allows more time for individuals to browse and interact with posts.

How to leverage it: Use a social media scheduler to line up posts for the weekend. See How to schedule a Facebook page update, and see what kind of activity you get. Don’t rely on HubSpot’s research alone, however. Conduct your own experiments to see what days and times tend to see the highest activity within your office. Pull your top posts and see if any trends emerge in the timing of those with the most interaction. Similarly, pull posts that saw no engagement and try to identify black holes in your sharing schedule to avoid in the future. Here’s a look at HubSpot’s analysis, which I pulled together for this post.

As you can see, our posts seem to generate the most activity on Sunday, followed shortly after by Monday and Tuesday. We garner lower engagement toward the end of the week. I also took a look at the time of day when activity is highest for us. Sorted below in the HubSpot social media tool, you can see that we have had good success sharing content with our audience in the mornings.

Understand the behavior that leads to hide, hide-all, and unlike

3In addition to auditing what’s working with your shares, take a look at what would motivate a user to hide, hide-all or unlike your content. Hiding content is tantamount to deleting an email without reading it. Hiding-all is the equivalent of unsubscribing, and unliking closes the relationship entirely. In Facebook’s new algorithm, content that has negative feedback from some users can cause it to be minimized or pulled from all news feeds. Take a look at what could be causing people to hide or unlike your content. Are you posting too frequently? Try altering your schedule to add more space between your posts. Are you asking for too much? Compare posts with different calls to action to see what types cause hides or low engagement.

Post more images and videos

4Our research and our day-to-day experience shows that images and videos tend to have much higher engagement than text-only posts or links. Make sure you’ve got a healthy mix of images Below, an image from United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley (an organization I support) shows the value of volunteering. The image resulted in 30 likes and 3 comments, among the highest levels of engagement on their page. Want to make an image even stronger? Couple it with a relevant link to your volunteer page or another call to action.

Balance your content

5Trying out different types of content will help you see what posts work best. In addition, keeping a healthy balance of different types of posts can help you engage different people. Oxfam does a nice job with this on their Facebook page. Think about mixing your content up to meet the interests of a growing audience and to keep your Facebook page fresh. Incorporate:

• Blog posts
• Images with calls to action
• Videos
• Cause-driven items for purchase
• Quotes from supporters
• Profiles of the people you serve
• Questions for your fans and followers
• Responses to your fans and followers

Advise super-fans to add your organization to an interest list

6One sure-fire way for your top supporter to see all of your organization’s shares is to encourage them to add you to an interest list. Interest lists on Facebook organize all of your favorite topics and keep you from missing posts. Even better, if the interest list is left public, others can subscribe it – expanding your reach.

You can create your own interest list with partner organizations or nonprofits in your geographic area, then encourage others to subscribe to it. Lists turn Facebook into a media consumption channel in addition to a social network.

Keep calm and inspire on

This was not the first adjustment Facebook has made and it likely won’t be the last. The best response to this and any change from a third party platform is to dissect what drives the change and determine how your social media strategy can best adapt to accommodate it. Early on, the algorithm change raised concerns that purchasing promoted posts would be the only reliable way to maintain a presence in the Facebook newsfeed. But a closer look at the character of the change reveals a number of methods that nonprofits can use remain on top without having to dip into vital funds. Even with algorithm changes, the main tenet of social shares remains true: Interesting, remarkable content will always rise to the top.

Related

• 13 ways to boost your Facebook Page reach without spending a dime (Socialbrite)

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