Well, if all the ones you are communicating with know you well already, then you may only want to communicate NEWS with your users, and then any e-mail newsletter system might do. The Marketing Automation system Otto will do quite a few things quite much better than any newsletter system, though, see the list under "Use Otto for Newsletters, too", below.
When to send newsletters, and when to not send newsletters
News will always go out just when you have something new to tell, and it's rarely targeted as part of your sales or lead funnel, since newsletters are for those who will just need to know the extra little information that they didn't know from before.
We normally say that plain e-mail newsletter services are excellent for news, whereas Otto is not only for sending news, but also for building relationships.
So, a newsletter system may be excellent to communicate with Bob who already knows you, and has done business with you before, but it may be lousy to send it out to James whom you just interacted with for the first time.
This means that whenever you get new contacts, e.g. through:
- Cold calling
- Web-site visitors
- Trade show visitors
You rather need to get them up to speed on what you're doing before you start to send them e-mail newsletters.
For this, you need a Marketing Automation sequence that can be sent out from Otto. Since you schedule it to be sent starting from the time when it's asked for, it will send out such pre-written information more in-line with the time when the user actually will come in contact with you, so it's more on the users' terms than yours, which helps the understanding by this new recipient.
What should this type of sequence be like?
You can offer your recipients, e.g.:
- your little "school" in how to learn the basics people need to know in your area,
- offer them a checklist of good things to know before choosing a vendor, or
- after a "good vibe" meeting, but without a purchase, ask them if it's OK to just send an e-mail every two months to simply ask if now is a better time to talk again.
Use Otto for newsletters, too
Furthermore, Otto can certainly be used to also send newsletters (or to only do that), and Otto will even help you customize those to better fit your target and to help you look more professional since it also does some other things that most e-mail newsletter services don't:
- Otto sends also notifications to send out physical samples, letters or giveaways, and even come with a fulfillment center that can send those things out for you which is convenient if there in one week would only be 3 recipients, the next 18, then back to 11 etc.
- Otto will also allow you to send actual e-mails much more customized to build a relationship. One of the most important is that instead of sending out e-mails from a noreply@theemailnewsletterservice on behalf of info@yourcompany.com, Otto will allow you to send e-mails directly from a real live person and using your own domain-name, like firstname.lastname@yourcompanyname.com. Now, which do you think is perceived as most professional, and likely to be the ones that will allow you to build a more sustainable relationship?
- Most newsletter services will require you to have an "opt-out" or "unsubscribe" link. Now, generally you should have it according to e.g. US Law in many cases, but it may be that you have separately agreed on that a recipient can not opt-out of your e-mails, or you send one-to-one personal e-mails, but just want to use a system to automate the send-out, then you can customize or even omit having an unsubscribe-link at the bottom of an e-mail sent from Otto. The reason we can do this, and a e-mail newsletter web-service cannot is because we set up a separate system for all clients, so if it would ever be abused by one client, it would not affect any other.
- Most newsletter services will allow you to track whether an e-mail is opened or if a user has clicked a link or not. However, few will allow you to see who has actually clicked, you'll only see the statistics, and even if they do, they will make your recipients a bit afraid to click the links, since they will not allow you to send users directly to your site, so if the recipient hovers over the link they'll see that they will be sent via a tracking link such as: http://tr.unpd.com/track?t=c&mid=4288770&uid=115854055, and who dares to click such a link? With Otto, you can use your regular web-site address, and can still add user-details since Otto tracks clicks via your regular Google Analytics account.
- A newsletter service will send one e-mail out to many at one time, whereas you with Otto can throttle those e-mail out to many over time, which is also why Otto comes with a notification-system so you don't have to login at a dashboard to see how your campaigns are doing, but you get actual e-mails telling e.g. that someone has clicked on a link yesterday, and now it may be a good time to do a follow-up phone call. See the image for how such an e-mail notification can look like below.
Naturally, also the pricing of Otto may be more beneficial for you, go here for more information on the pricing of Otto, or contact us.
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