Email Marketing

Once you have gotten your business up and going and you have gotten customers to sign up for your newsletter you need to find an email marketing company so you can design you newsletter.
Today I'm going to write about a few of them.


The first I'm going to write about is Constant Contact. Constant Contact will provide you with a customizable website visitor form, over 100 professional looking HTML email templates (newsletters, promos, invites, and more). List management and hosting (including unsubscribe and bounce management.). Automatic delivery in the correct format, HTML or text. Real time reporting (including who opens your newsletters and what they click on.).
You can try it out for 60 days (you can only use 100 contacts) and if you like it you can sign up for $15 (o-500 contacts), $30 (501-2,000), $50 (2,501-5,000) $75 (5001-10,000) $150 (10,001-25,000). If you have over 25,000 contacts, contact them for pricing. If you want to put up surveys on your site as well you can sign up for a free trial. If you get 0-250 responses it will cost $15 a month. 251-1,500 ($30), 1501-5000 ($50). If you have 5,001 or more survey responses add 5 cents per response. You can also prepay for 6 months (10% off) or a year (15% off). Your time period may be adjusted if you upgrade your account in that time frame. Prepaid is only available for the $15 survey option.


If you have an eBay store or sell on ProStores then you might want to try out Sales in A Click. Sales in a Click is a simple, affordable email marketing service that drives customers to your store every month automatically. You will keep getting sales from your valuable customers & prospects. They will upload their email addresses for you or you can do it yourself. You don’t have to write a thing. They write it and send it for you. Their seamless integration with the eBay store platform enables them an unprecedented level of automation, and is fully compliant with eBay Stores email policy. Just set up your account choose content criteria, specify your preferred schedule, and a professional looking email is delivered to your customers each month. You can try it out for 30 days. If you want to continue it will cost $24.95 for 6 months.


The last one I want to write about is OnMarketer. You have two options: OnLetterHead and OnMarketer. OnLetterHead is a one-to-one branded email solution. This software was created to work directly in Microsoft Outlook (OnLetterhead doesn't work with Mac). With this option you can have your own custom designed email with your brand on it giving each email your own personal touch. Now with OnMarketer you can send bulk emails and use mobile marketing. You can see real time reports that are easy to read and understand. Before you send out your emails you can see the likelihood of your emails getting thru the spam filters. If your emails are likely to be seen as spam you can make changes to your email and then send it out. There are other features that you can use, just go to OnMarketer to see more.

You can start a free trial of OnLetterhead (I don't know for how long). If you decide to upgrade, you can choose from 5 options: Gallery only ($228), Basic ($278), Starter ($478), Standard ($578), Professional ($678). With OnMarketer free trial you can send emails to 20 people and if you decide to upgrade you can also choose from 5 options Basic ($250), Starter ($500), Standard ($700), Professional ($1,000), and Expert ($2,000).

I haven't used anyone of these programs yet but if you like anyone of these try it out and let me know how your experience was. There are more email marketing programs I will be writing about those in the future.

Some other sites you can sell your stuff at

If you want to sell beyond eBay and Amazon, there are other places where you can sell your products.

You can go to a site called MyStore. It is an e-commerence provider offering selling support including hosting, design, marketing, fullfillment, inventory management, and customer management. What makes MyStore different from other marketplaces is you (the seller) will deal directly with your customers. You will have complete control of your stores content. There are no seller fees. If you want to check it out go to mystore.com.

Another option is ProStores. It is owned by ebay, so you will get the same features you get on eBay but you will have complete control over your site. You have 4 options to choose to from. The first one is starter. It cost $9.95 a month. If you want to have your own domain, it will cost you an additional $8.95. You can display between 20-250 products. You will have SSL security (so your customers info will be safe and secured). You can choose from 13 themes and layouts to give your store a professional look. You can use the logo generator to create your own logo in a matter of minutes. You can cross-sell your products to increase your sales. If you don't know how much to charge for tax you can use the tax caculator. You can create your own shipping rates and configure your own shipping methods and rates for each product. You can use ebay Sync to simutasly sell your products on ProStores and eBay. ProStores will automatically manage inventory on both sites. Your product catalog will be automatically submited to Google base You can upgrade your store without interuption.

The second level is Business. It cost $29.95 a month. You get all the feautures of starter, plus you can display up to 10,000 products. you get 24/7 technical phone support. You can create multipule user accounts if you have employees. You can use 3rd party feautures like
Adobe Dreamweaver to spruce up your site. You will have mutiple payment methods (real time credit card processing plus store card, check and money order payment options) . You can create a mailing list so your customers will know when you added new products. You will get SEO tools that will fine tune your store for maxiumum search engine visibilty. You can send your catalog feeds to Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and Google Base. You can automatically hide products that are out of stock. And you can utilize sophisticated web anaylics to analize traffic activity on your site.

The third level is Advanced. It cost $74.95 a month. You get all the options of starter and business plus you can display up to 50,000 products. You can offer coupons to your customers. You can create and manage promotions and merchandising programs for registured store members. You can sell electronic downloads like MP3 music, PDF documents, and JPG images. You can sell informational products, services, subscribtions, memberships, and downloadable content.

The fourth and final option is Enterprise. It cost $299.95 a month. You get all the features of starter, business, and advanced plus you can display up to 100,000 products. You can create mutiple buyer groups including retail and wholesale while providing unique discounts or pricing. You can create an affiliate program (you pay people to drive traffic to your site). If one of these packages intrigue you, you can sign up for the one month trial.

I had plan one writing about a couple more places you can sell your stuff at but ProStores took up most of this post. So I will write about those on the next post. As always leave me feedback on how well (or not) your doing on these sites.

eBay vs Amazon: which is better?

You have decided to start your business. Now you need to know where to sell your products. There are plenty of places where you can sell your products. Of course everyone knows about eBay and Amazon. If your starting out and you don't feel like starting your own site then I would advice you to use eBay. You can also use Amazon (but there is a big difference between the two sites). With eBay, you will have your own profile and you can create your own eBay store. You can also view eBay university (a set of videos that will help you grow your business). You can join groups that can also grow your business. The biggest postive about eBay is that they have over 200 million users worldwide. The biggest negative I had from my experience with Ebay was that they suspended my account for no apparent reason and it took me 8 days to get my account reinstated. I'm also fighting to get my seller fees back. The other negative thing about ebay is sometimes you have to write them 2 or 3 times before they write you back (But there much better than Amazon. I'll get to that in the next paragraph.).

Now about Amazon. The product you sell will go into that product category (ie: clothing & apparel, electronics, health & beauty, etc). If you sell in certain categories (like the ones I just mentioned) you have to get permission from Amazon to sell in those categories (Be warned: You will need to sell in other categories before you are approved in the restricted categories.). If you want to sell alot of products, you can sign up for seller central. Also if you ship alot, you can join Amazon fulfillment. It will cost $39.99 a month. Amazon also has over 80 million users worldwide. Now as I said earlier about eBay, you will have to write Amazon 4 or 5 times maybe even more before they respond back to you. Personally I don't like using Amazon, but it could work for you. You can leave me comments on how well or not well your experience is on eBay and Amazon.

If you want to use other sites or create your own webstore, read my next post on other sources you can use for your business.