Email Marketing for MSPs: Some Tips and Solutions

Do you use email marketing to promote your MSP business?

If not, perhaps you’ve assumed that this kind of marketing is dying out due to new marketing methods such as mobile advertising and social media promotion.

It’s fair to say this is an incorrect assumption. Email marketing is still a valid and effective way of promoting your MSP if you get the basics right.

Even better, it’s easy and very inexpensive compared to other advertising methods.

Let’s start with a few basic tips:

Build your list

“Building your subscriber list” is something that’s often referred to in relation to blogs or affiliate marketing sites, but it’s no less relevant if you wish to promote your MSP via email.

The most crucial key to building your list is never to miss an opportunity to add an email address to your database. This means collecting business cards at industry events and seminars, making sure you collect email addresses from all potential sales prospects, and, just as importantly, making sure all your existing clients are on the list too.

Know the law

There’s a very fine line between email marketing and spamming! It is therefore essential to make sure you operate within the law of your country of operation.

For example, in the United Kingdom, you are permitted to send business-to-business email communications without a company “opting in” to receive them. In Germany, this is not permitted, even when sending to generic (i.e. info@) type addresses.

Use a dedicated email marketing platform

Sending marketing emails to your database via your internal mail server is NOT the way to go about things. You risk your mail server ending up on spam blacklists, and serious reputational damage if someone, in error, exposes members’ email addresses by mistake.

There are many great email-marketing services out there, all of which take dealing with list management and subscription cancellations away from your internal infrastructure. We’ll discuss a few of them next.

Email marketing platforms are about far more than simply managing a list of subscribers. If you want your marketing efforts to be successful, you must continually tweak your strategy to ensure you are sending out communications that interest readers and (even more importantly) convert to sales.

All three of the products we mention below provide extensive functionality – not just in terms of sending out your marketing emails, but in analyzing your success, which is so important: How many people open the emails? How many click through for further information? How many people just head straight for the “unsubscribe” button? These solutions will tell you all of this and much more:

Constant Contact

Constant Contact provide great email design tools, plenty of analytical information and good integration with social networking platforms. They also offer a free trial.

• http://www.constantcontact.com/

MailChimp

Boasting nearly as much functionality as Constant Contact, MailChimp is the choice of many SMEs for one key reason: it’s completely free for mailing lists with up to 2000 subscribers.

• http://mailchimp.com/

AWeber

Considered the industry standard in opt-in marketing and autoresponder technology by many webmasters, AWeber is well worth consideration, and is still relatively inexpensive for small and medium sized databases.

• http://www.aweber.com/

If you’ve not yet tried one of these solutions, why not get a new email marketing campaign started today?

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