by Rudy Barell

Email marketing is one tool that an increasing number of businesses have latched onto within the past couple years as it is an amazing opportunity to double or even triple profits. If you have decided that this method of marketing to your customers is a strategy you’d like to tackle, plenty of resources are out there to help you get started. However, it can be difficult distinguishing among the many different email marketing companies. Here are several characteristics of a reputable email marketing service.Building the Opt-In Permission-Based Mailing List

A crucial part of email marketing is having easy-to-use contact list management features. First and foremost, an email marketing service should allow you to be able to important your existing mailing addresses from a file on your computer. This is often the preferred method when adding a lot of contacts because manually entering your existing contacts email address one-by-one is more time consuming and leaves lots of room for errors to occur.

Second, one of the characteristics of list management that an email marketing provider should contain is a feature that allows your list to be segmented into multiple groups. As you build your email list, you’ll see why the segmentation is important. Remember, not each contact is the same and having different segments lets you treat them differently.

A third feature that your provider should have is the easy-integration of a sign-up box on your website. Being able to use a sign-up box from your email marketing service is perhaps the most important feature you should be looking for. A sign-up box that’s strategically placed on your site acts as an automatic marketing tool that works on autopilot adding subscribers as soon as they enter their email address.

Sending Emails

An automatic email service should offer a variety of options when it comes to sending out your emails to subscribers. There should be pre-designed HTML templates, image galleries that you can use if you want to include images, and there should also be the option to customize your own design. In addition, there should be guide points along the way and systematic instructions to help if you get lost. An intuitive, user-friendly, and easy-to-use interface is what you ultimately need in an ideal email marketing service.

Tracking Tools

An important part of the marketing process is tracking your efforts. In order to know the success of your efforts, you need to know what your subscribers do with the information contained within those emails. A reputable email marketing provider should contain such data like how many emails were opened, which links your prospects clicked on the most, and how many emails bounced because of invalid or full email addresses. In addition, important subscriber statistics that you should have access to include what your email-list growth rate it as well as how many subscribers have been added and removed. Ideally these reports will be updated in real-time so that you don’t have to wait to gauge your success.

All of these issues are important to look out for when attempting to choose an email marketing service. The ability to customize emails, easily maintain your list, and have data readily available at your fingertips are all features that will help you succeed at the highest level with your email marketing efforts.

About the Author

Rudy Barell is a Senior Account Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing program used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing software. Try it free!