There are several reasonable choices for putting together your email marketing and shopping cart infrastructure. To be clear, we’re talking about specific email marketing tools, rather than more soft (but critical) skills of writing content and figuring out frequency, getting permission, etc.
As with any technology, things are always changing, so it’s a good idea to stay plugged in to what’s happening and make changes when appropriate. There are two main types of email marketing tools; 1) Stand-alone solutions that specialize only in email marketing; and 2) One Stop Shopping solutions that include email marketing tools with eCommerce (shopping cart) capabilities.
I promised that we’d cut to the chase, so just for your education we’ll take a quick look and then talk about the most widely used solution.
1. Stand-alone Email Marketing Tools
There are lots of software solutions that will provide the features that you need to conduct email marketing campaigns. Some are free, some are inexpensive, and some ramp up the cost significantly, as your list grows. In my opinion, one of the most important considerations for a beginner is the Keep it Simple factor. Are you going to be selling things through your website? If you are, then you need to think about more than short-term cost. If you will sell products and you’ll be doing email marketing, building your “list” (the prospect and client names that you will gather into your database) will be much easier to manage if you have just one. When someone makes a purchase on your website, you will collect their name and other contact details in a database. But if you have a separate email marketing system, when people come to sign up for your ezine (newsletter) or blog, their contact information will be added to a separate list (or database). If you’re technically savvy, or are OK spending quite a lot of time reading user manuals or talking with tech support (when there is tech support), there is typically a way to sort of synchronize the two databases, but it can get complicated. We’re about simple, remember?
If all you want is email marketing and no shopping cart, then take a look at aWeber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp. These all have similar features, but the user interface is different — so you’ll want to kick the tires, compare how easy it is to use against the cost, and you’re on your way.
2. One Stop Shopping — Email and Shopping Cart Combined
For beginners there is a lot to do, and we’re usually excited to get going, so there’s not a lot of time to spend experimenting or exploring. That means you want to look for the solution that has the best combination of;
- Features
- Ease of use (or plenty of skilled VAs or other users who can help you)
- Price
And, of course, you want your list in one database so that you can control it better (the technical aspect of course, not the people!). There are a few options out there that can do these things for you; the most widely used are 1 Shopping Cart and InfusionSoft. 1 Shopping Cart has been the chosen solution for online business for many years because of its combination of features and price (I’m not going to say it’s super easy to use, but there are lots of people who are trained in it, so you can always get help). InfusionSoft is making a huge leap in popularity right now, but unfortunately the price point is prohibitive for most new online businesses — so we’ll leave that one for another day.
The Winner Choice Is
For beginners or small to mid-size online businesses, 1 Shopping Cart still seems to be the best game in town. Having a single solution, single database is simply more cost effective and easier to maintain.
The benefits of a product like 1 Shopping Cart are;
- One prospect / client database that can be broken into separate lists for email marketing
- No duplication, so if an email address is changed, you don’t have to worry that it’s changed in one database but not another
- All your records are in one place – you can easily see the history of a particular client – what she’s purchased, which lists she has subscribed to, etc.
- Database metrics are all in one place — you can monitor your progress in just one piece of software
- One user interface to learn
Let me be clear – 1 Shopping Cart is not a perfect solution (in fact it can be crazy making) but for the features and price, and the fact that there is a large, knowledgeable user base where you can hire reasonably priced help if you need it, it’s frequently the best solution for a beginner, or smaller operation. You can always move up to InfusionSoft when you’ve made it to the big time.
If you know of another solution that is a good alternative, please tell us!
