I get it. Choosing your email service provider can feel like a life-or-death decision.
And in a way, it is. After all, your ability to connect with your audience, build and nurture relationships, and drive sales depends on having a reliable ESP.
But how do you make that decision? Cost may be your driving decision-maker today, but you also need to consider usability, deliverability, scalability, and other factors. This infographic by my friends at Email Monks spells it out.
How to Choose Your Best Email Service Provider
My Recommendations for your Best ESP
I’ve personally used AWeber, MailChimp, and InfusionSoft. Here’s my recommendation for each:
AWeber is a fantastic choice if your budget is tight but you still want big results from your email marketing. Reporting is great, so you can easily track the effectiveness of your emails. You can create as many lists as you need and send your emails to one or all of them. Customer support is also incredibly helpful when you’re trying to do something complicated. (You can read about how AWeber helped me improve Crazy Egg’s email subscription rate here.)
MailChimp is free up to 500 subscribers, so if you’ve got a budget of zero, this is the place to start. You’ll need to pay if you want to set up autoresponders, but the cost is affordable. And creating your emails is super easy. You’ll just need to get used to calling them campaigns rather than emails.
InfusionSoft is your best solution if you have a big budget and want to combine your email, customer data base and shopping cart. IS was built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, so they give you the functionality to build complex campaigns that run on autopilot. The only drawbacks are no automated RSS email for your blog, and the steep learning curve.
