Everybody thinks social media is the most effective method of reaching customers, every day we hear facebook has 2 billion users and Instagram has surpassed 1 billion users too. However what is frequently missing from these conversations is one simple fact: You need an email address to open a social media account, and that’s an indication of how powerful email marketing can be in your customer engagement.

According to a report by Radicati, there should have been 4.9 billion email accounts in the world by 2017, it’s the 10th of September 2019 and you can only guess how many email accounts have been opened since then. The point is sending email blasts is just as effective a marketing strategy as using any other channel.

Email marketing, as the name implies is a form of direct marketing that uses emails as a medium of passing across messages to selected customers at scale. There is no limit to the kind of email blasts you can send to your customers, whether you want to tell them about this awesome new feature you just launched or give them a recap of your most promising offers; email is a fantastic way to reach your target audience and build steady rapport.

According to isitwp. Email marketing has several key advantages over traditional marketing, including the following:

• Increase repeat visits: Over 70% of website visitors abandoning your website will never return. When you build an email list, you can build a connection with your visitors by collecting their email addresses and sending them valuable content.
• Build a loyal following: Repeat visitors are more likely to convert into customers, compared to first-time visitors. Studies show that it takes 3-4 visits to your website for your potential customers to think of doing business with you.
• Increase sales: Email conversions outperform both social and organic search traffic. So if you’re looking to make sales, then you’ll need to start email marketing.

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Moving forward, the first step in sending bulk emails is building your email list, you can either grow your list organically, one email at a time or buy an email list. This is very tricky as it is important to be able to trust the information your vendor provides. As a beginner, going with referrals of trusted acquaintances is the smart move. This is because you want the emails you have to be active and still in service. The next step is selecting which email marketing platform to use; 

TOP EMAIL MARKETING SERVICES AVAILABLE

1. Constant Contact:  This comes with a 60-day free trial and offers users multiple customization and integrations options while keeping it simple and user-friendly. 

Email Plan:

• 0-500 subscribers: $20 per month
• 501-2,500 subscribers: $45 per month
• 2,501-5,000 subscribers: $65 per month
• 5,001-10,000 subscribers: $95 per month

Email Plus Plan:

• 0-500 subscribers: $45 per month
• 501- 2,500 subscribers: $70 per month
• 2,501-5,000 subscribers: $95 per month

VERDICT: TOO EXPENSIVE FOR SMALL SMEs IN NIGERIA 

2. MailChimp: This is the most popular email marketing platform out there because let’s face it, it has massive appeal. MailChimp is a simple to use email marketing tool for bloggers, light internet users and smaller websites/businesses as it comes with a decent free plan.

Free plan: free forever

• Send up to 12,000 emails per month
• Grow your list up to 2,000 subscribers
• Email support included for 30 days

Grow plan: Plans start at $10 per month

• Up to 5,000 subscribers: $50 per month
• Up to 10,000 subscribers: $75 per month
• Up to 25,000 subscribers: $150 per month
• Up to 52,000 subscribers: $250 per month

Pro plan: Plans start at $199 per month

• Up to 5,000 subscribers: $50 per month
• Up to 10,000 subscribers: $75 per month

VERDICT: TOO EXPENSIVE FOR SMALL SMEs IN NIGERIA

[blockquote text=”The question remains – How can you send newsletters at scale without going bankrupt?” text_color=”” width=”” line_height=”undefined” background_color=”” border_color=”” show_quote_icon=”no” quote_icon_color=””]

Because let’s be honest, you live in Nigeria – most SMEs can’t comfortably use MailChimp to do your email marketing without feeling it on the bottom line – crunching some quick numbers lets you know that if you were going to send newsletters to five thousand email addresses, it would cost you about [$75] 27,375 Naira monthly and for small businesses/startups in Nigeria – this is very steep cost to take on in the early stages of business operations. MailChimp is amazing if you wanted to keep emailing a subscriber list that would never grow above 2000.

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Therefore you have a problem here because as a budding entrepreneur, hustler, business owner, etc. – what if your subscriber list grows to 3000, 5000 or 10000? What happens next? Short Answer: Mailchimp’s prices start to get a little steep. Every email marketer knows this problem, the bigger your subscriber base, the more expensive it costs to keep in touch with them. However, what if you could solve this problem with cheaper options on the market? We’re talking up to 100x cheaper here. Below we will introduce you to two much cheaper email marketing tools to help you save money on your email marketing budget.

First, we’ll start with MAILERLITE:

While MailChimp’s free plan doesn’t come with a lot of cool features pro features, Mailerlite lets you have all the cool features in the free plan. Though in this category, you can say that MailChimp is the winner since you still have 2000 subscribers on the free plan, contrasted against Mailerlite’s 1000. However, when you become a paying customer, Mailerlite becomes the superior choice, because as your subscribers increase you pay lesser and best of all, you also get unlimited emails.

Another amazing thing to note about Mailerlite is that you can automate emails and schedule one mailer after the other based on several factors,  for example ‘opened last campaign’, ‘clicked on a link’ or ‘send next mail after a fixed number of days’. A feature that you would have to pay for on other tools is free on Mailerlite. MailChimp now sports this as a free feature but not before services like Mailerlite blazed the trail.

Additionally, Mailerlite sports an amazing 24/7 round the clock live chat support, so if you run into issues, you are covered. The support team will make sure to get back to you in 2-5 minutes of your messaging. In fact, according to Forbes, they are ranked highest if you measure by the percentage of customer satisfaction.

SENDY:

This is our fave, Sendy is a simple self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing delivery rate.

With Sendy, you can install the application directly on your server or subdomain and be ready to go!! The application costs a one time $59 installation fee to get the show on the road. 

Now the most important thing you need to know is that it costs a ridiculous $1 to send 10,000 emails through Sendy because the emails are sent through Amazon SES. I don’t know if you can see a sweeter deal than this.

On Sendy, you get the following amazing features, comparable to Mailchimp and trust us when we say you’re not missing much if you make the switch.

• Multiple brands (manage multiple products and services),
• lists and subscribers (mass import/delete subscribers, custom fields, single/double opt-in, custom subscribe/unsubscribe confirmation page, thank you/goodbye emails, subscribe form or API to add users),
• Advanced analytics and reports,
• Automatic bounce, complaint and unsubscribe handling (no manual post campaign cleanups),
• Custom fields (create more personalized content for your clients),
• Autoresponders and more.

To get started on Sendy, you will need some very basic programming knowledge as you will need to upload files to a hosting server, set up a database and work with an Amazon Web Services console, but not to worry we are here to help. To get started, fill the form here

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Send us a mail at joshua@astract.com or call 0701 650 4685 to talk to the team.