Even though there are many other vendors who offer similar services, Constant Contact has become the preferred one for blasting out emails and online newsletters (ezines). At MB/I, we use Constant Contact for our own blasts and for those of our clients.

It is easy to use, inexpensive, and it provides all the marketing information we need to know. Business owners can choose a template and have a message up and running in no time. Or, they can hire firms like ours to design a template that matches their own sites and marketing materials and to prepare each subsequent issue.

The …

Hey! Stop It with the Exclamation Points!

Wow! I get lots of emails that shout at me! Maybe the sender is on her third espresso! Or maybe she hopes her excitement is infectious!

She’s wrong. Exclamation points are more annoying than exciting.

In your business communications—email, newsletter, web content, brochures and flyers—don’t rely on punctuation (or fancy fonts and words in color) to make your point.

Use too many exclamation points and your readers will stop paying attention to any of them. Be deliberate: Exclaim when you know precisely why you’re doing so it and how the punctuation aids your message.

Exclamation points can aid …

We design and send out emails and newsletters for our clients on an on-going basis. We use Constant Contact. I got asked today if Constant Contact allows for a custom template. The answer is yes. That’s exactly what we build for our clients… and for our own email-based communications. You can see samples of our own newsletters by clicking here.

How to set up a custom template in Constant Contact?
When you are on the templates page ready to make a choice, scroll down all the way to the bottom and choose custom. This allows you to copy and paste …

This posting is based 100% in our experience with our own emails and newsletters. We started sending out emails to our contacts in the summer of 2008. The first emails that we sent out were all about one topic per email. We picked something timely we thought our clients and prospects needed to know and invited them to contact us if they wanted this “something” to be implemented on their sites.

These emails had a click through rate anywhere from 1.3% to 2.4%… low given that the statistics show:

• B2B newsletters range from 5 to 15 percent  
• B2C promotional emails’ range from about …
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Most business send out newsletters via email or “ezines” on a regular basis. It’s a great and relatively inexpensive way to keep in touch with clients. An “A+” newsletter should:

• Get you repeat business from your existing clients;
• Remind those clients to refer you to people they know; and 
• Prompt them to forward the issue so you can get new business.

It’s a lot to accomplish in one email.

Why do some newsletters success and others fail? I think the level of success depends on:

• The type of product or service. Impulse-buy products do very well. All the newsletter needs to do is show us hard-to-resist …
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