Monday, September 9, 2013

Email Marketing - A Must Use Tool

Many website entrepreneurs have mentioned that one thing they wish they had done from the beginning was include an email subscription list. Email marketing is a great way to connect with your followers, but often we don’t know enough about it.

I’ve used email marketing for about 2 years and my favourite to use is Mailchimp. It’s easy to use, the support is great, they have a host of features and… they are the only big email marketing company that has a free package. Unless you’re sending to thousands of subscribers, you won’t pay a cent, so it’s perfect for starting out and getting a feel for things without having to splash some cash upfront.

One of the biggest draw cards to Mailchimp (although some other email marketers have this too, but you have to pay for the subscription) is the “signup form”. This form goes onto your website so followers can enter in their details and get added to your subscribers list. Mailchimp makes it simple by providing the html and also a WordPress plugin!

With this plugin, you just need to install it, add your “API key”, and the setup takes you through the configuration process. One problem I did run into was the alignment of the text and text boxes in the widget. I fixed this by adding this bit of code to my style.css file.

#mc_signup_form .mc_var_label {
display: block;
float: left;
width: 100%;
}


Another Mailchimp plugin made by a third party is called “MailChimp by ContactUs”. It allows for a bit more configuration and you’ll need to fiddle a bit to get it right, but it does have a few cool features.

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