There have been no updates on our blog for several months as you may have noticed (or not, if this is your first visit). That is not due to there being “nothing going on” here at Intrigue. On the contrary…
Actually, a LOT has been going on. We’ve been inundated with many new projects and we’ve had to burn the midnight oil to make sure that we’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s. It’s one of those “good” problems to have. You can never have TOO much work coming in. It’s a good sign for us that even though the economy still is recovering, we’re doing ok at the moment.
One of the new projects we took in was a request to send out a customized eblast to a limited number of recipients. After doing some research on the issue, we decided that signing up for a dedicated email marketing service was the best way to go.
I had looked into these services a few years back and there are a handful of quality companies to choose from. We really could have gone with any number of them so it was almost a roll of the dice as to which one to choose.
We were also pressed for time so I had to make a recommendation rather quickly. My first choice was Constant Contact. There was an internal discussion about it and we had some questions about what the service included and for how much. A phone call was made to the company and we received satisfactory answers to all our questions.
Constant Contact Home Page
The green light was given to sign up for an account.
There is no form to fill out online. The process is initiated through a phone call. A bit strange, but it was no problem. Everything went smoothly. The sign up was quick and relatively painless.
Constant Contact does offer a number of features, which include Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Online Surveys and Social Media. When you sign up for an account, you have to choose which of those services you want as they are all priced separately. For us, we just needed the “Email Marketing” service. And since we pre-paid for the entire year, we even got a discount off the regular pricing.
OK, so how well does it work? Although we only started using it a few days ago, the initial impression is a good one. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but there is an abundance of information including FAQ’s and tutorial videos on their website to help newbies get started. It certainly helped and answered a bunch of questions.
Alright, it was time to send an email out. The process is pretty straightforward. Give the email a title, choose a design theme, add content and then modify the information to suit. One quirk I encountered was that their New Email Wizard interface was not compatible with Apple Safari or Google Chrome. They said that support has now been added for the “Classic” interface. Not really sure what the difference would be, but I just fired up Firefox and worked from there anyway.
The first email took a while to compose. So many choices to be made. Finally, I got the content the way I wanted it and fired it off to a few test recipients. Perhaps “firing” isn’t quite accurate. When you choose “Send Now”, it doesn’t really mean “now” like you might expect with a regular email. It actually determines for you when “Now” really is.
For the first email, that meant a wait of between 5 and 10 minutes. Not the end of the world, but I guess that’s the way it has to work.
Anyway, it came out just fine. I tweaked the content a bit, and sent out a handful of other tests. All came out nicely. All the hotlinks were clickable and it looked good.
We sent the email to our client and they really liked it. Mission accomplished! Now we just have to plan a strategy for how to best utilize this tool for Intrigue. Lots of possibilities…
There is a free 60 day trial that you can use to try it out. If you wish to sign up, feel free to click our handy referral link at the bottom of this post. We will both receive a $30 credit for the referral. Not a bad deal, huh?