Driving customers to your website is the best way to increase revenues, and anything that helps achieve that goal is welcome news to companies. But generating effective lists is a big job; doing it manually is hopeless, software can be complex and expensive, and getting what you really need—the best prospects for your business—can be elusive.
There are several options, however, that can be quite effective without breaking the bank. One option is going through a service, such as the just-announced list development and management service from Inside Small Biz, a members-only online community for small business owners.
The Lancaster, Penn., company this week introduced the service, which allows companies to access various databases and have a list targeted for their offerings and to their goals.
The goal, said president Kae Wagner, is to give small businesses a leg up in reaching new customers and markets through email marketing campaigns, prospect communications and data collection through surveys.
But a service is only one option in effective list management. More traditional are various types of software, both paid and free, and both standard and hosted.
Two of the most popular commercial offerings that target small and midsized businesses specifically are Lyris Inc.’s ListManager and Constant Contact’s Email List Management solution.
Both focus on solely list management (although they also have fuller-fledged marketing suites with other features as well). In general, they provide the tools to build and manage opt-in email lists and create, send and track marketing campaigns. Some tools in this category offer native integration with major databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL.
Lyris ListManager offers two versions: the standard package for online newsletters, email alerts and other email announcements; and the Pro version for targeted, one-to-one email marketing and personalized campaigns. Lyris also has an enterprise version with lead and purchase tracking and ROI analysis. The standard package starts at $775 but can go much higher depending on list size, mailing speed and degree of customization. The Pro version starts at $5,525, and the enterprise version at $18,425.
Constant Contact’s web-based email list management solution allows companies to build permission-based email lists (contacts who have requested to receive communication from your company). It also includes facilities for importing, managing and cleaning email lists, as well as a variety of templates and real-time reporting functions. Pricing is either monthly or in advance, with a discount. The fee is determined by the maximum number of unique email addresses used during the billing period.
If pricing is too steep and a service like Inside Small Biz isn’t for you, consider one of the many low-cost free, shareware-type tools. Although features will be limited, they cost little upfront.
One such tool that has won several awards is ListMotor (www.listmotor.biz). For $149 per user, companies can extract needed fields from raw data files to compile lists, merge multiple lists while discarding duplicates, remove and filter items based on defined criteria, produce samples of a larger list according to specified options, separate lists by domains, include additional addresses into an outgoing email list in a specified way, split lists into smaller lists and keep basic statistics.
The free version of MailList Controller from ArcLab Software Technologies offers a full suite of list management, list automation and permission email marketing features. It is capable of sending out personalized messages; managing multiple mailing lists; and handling newsletters, ezines and announcements and group emails. It also supports opt-in, webform submissions, and subscribe and remote requests. It can separate incoming messages into list messages, detect errors, and can either use an internal database or a linked commercial database as a data source. It can import from Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, SQL Server or ODBC.
While the free version is limited to 100 recipients per list, paid versions, which range from $99 to $200 per unit, can support tens of thousands. All versions run on the company’s computers.
E-mailSmartz’ suite of shareware tools, which also have won numerous awards, include E-mail Tarantula, an email finder and extractor designed to help companies create targeted email lists for bulk email marketing and E-Mail Manager, a list management tool that collects unsubscribed users’ email addresses, merges and sorts mailing lists, and removes duplicate email addresses. E-mail Tarantula is $119.90 and E-Mail Manager is $99.90, although promotions are frequent. Upgrades are free.
