E-Newsletter options - a tip for you

[DruidCarol]

There was a post today about Jobber Software and integration with an e-newsletter service and the company clarified that they were providing integration with MailChimp, not Constant Contact.

In my business, I have noticed that Constant Contact is not playing well with a lot of other vendors that offer customer relationship management (CRM support) or business management systems similar to Jobber. One of my clients keeps running into this in particular.

I have begun to "assume" that Constant Contact is moving toward becoming more like a CRM system for small businesses. They aren't there yet, however. If you think you might be using several different packages to manage different aspects of you business and want an e-newsletter/e-mailing service, you might want to consider MailChimp. Their free version allows up to 2000 contacts in the database and a pretty generous number of emails per month (12,000 emails sent per month). That isn't just a limited trial that expires in 30 days, it can be FREE FOREVER! MailChimp has nice templates, keeps stats on who opens and clicks through the links in an email you send, and can upload contacts from CSV files like Excel, Outlook, etc. And it plays well with others!

Just a suggestion for those of you who are leaning toward some form of email marketing and if you're just building your clientele, save yourselves some money! Constant Contact is very nice--and you may not need to ever pay for it if you have a small mailing list.

Cheers!

 

[LilRed]

Thank you for passing this along, it is very helpful.

 

[Jobber]

Hey Carol, awesome information for people.

The reason we will be providing integration with Mailchimp first is mainly because it is easier for most people to use and get started with. Internally for our mailing lists we use Constant Contact, but have also used Mailchimp in the past.

Mailchimp's free plan is great. We have a lot of users exporting their client list to csv and then importing them into Mailchimp. That will be made easier when the integration is done.

We have a complete guide to doing this on our blog. If it is allowed I can post a link to it in this thread. The guide could be used for any field service software that allows exporting.

Another reason Mailchimp can be great, is something they have called Chimpadedoo. It lets you collect emails from a simple app on your phone/tablet. It works even if you are out of data/wifi range, and when you get signal again it will push the collected emails into one of your lists.

Can be great for collecting client emails when you are talking to them to be used for marketing later. Say that you offer exclusive discounts to those on the mailing list to get people interested.

-Landen