10 reasons why using an email marketing service is good for your business

We recently had an email exchange with a woman who chose not to use an email marketing service (EMS), like MailChimp, over “regular” email because she didn’t want to use a template — she felt like a template would make the email less personal.

MailChimp and WordPress

While there are many email marketing services available, we prefer MailChimp because it integrates so well with many WordPress themes and plugins and because it’s free for up to 2000 list subscribers (as of Feb. 9, 2022).

EMS benefits

In our email exchange, we cited the advantages associated with using an EMS that she may have not considered:

• EMS provide very useful analytics that, over time, yield a wealth of information about your email recipients — data that give you a much greater chance of getting the right message to the right person at the right time!
• Templates make it easy to include the sender’s physical address and an unsubscribe link, both of which are required content under federal law.
• The sender won’t get an error message from their email service for sending out too many email messages. For example, the current Gmail email sending limit is 2000 emails per 24 hours when sending from their web interface. Other providers have different daily or even hourly limits. And, if you send the mails yourself, you must be sure to include your physical address and an unsubscribe link, both of which are required content under federal law.
• Templates make it easy to send attractive HTML email that will get noticed and increase conversions.
• Images can be tricky in email. With an EMS template or a custom email created with an easy-to-use email builder, images are easily included.
• Emails sent via an EMS are generally responsive, or mobile-ready, so they will look good on screens of all sizes.
• Automation – You can setup emails to fire based on events, like if a user subscribes to your list via a form on your website, a user leaves a product in a shopping cart, or you publish a new blog post on your website, etc.
• Special, personalized fields can be inserted in subjects and bodies of messages. Data that an EMS stores such as name, city, etc., can usually be used. For example, a message sent to me could say “Good news for Ellicott City residents” in the subject line and “Dear Lynne,” in the body.
• EMS will keep your email list up-to-date by handling unsubscribe requests, tracking hard and soft bounces, removing duplicate addresses, etc.
• Most EMS can be integrated with other popular services such as Eventbrite. Make sure to find the one that best fits your needs.

At the end of our exchange, we pointed out that EMS templates are typically highly customizable and that it is quite possible to “simplify” the design so that it more closely resembles a personal email message. We hope she’ll try an EMS.