Promoting your site through e-mail blasts or newsletters has always been a popular way to drive sales, traffic, or branding -- but it's not always cheap or easy. That's where GotMarketing comes in, and its self-service e-mail marketing offering could make you reevaluate the costs of e-mail marketing.
GotMarketing's Campaigner service enables e-commerce merchants to set up their own opt-in e-mail efforts with only a modicum of expertise and spending. The secret is that Campaigner, which is hosted on GotMarketing's site, is entirely self-service.
"What's most attractive about our offering is that it's entirely opt-in, permission-based and self-serve," said Tak Kusano, marketing director at GotCompany, GotMarketing's parent. "Self-serve is the most important one there -- it's wizard-driven and template-based. The customer doesn't really even need to talk to a customer service rep or salesperson to get it running ... all they need is a credit card."
Merchants using Campaigner -- the service is also accessible through partners including Yahoo! Small Business and, more recently, hosting and managed service player Hostway -- are walked through a template-guided system enabling them to deliver HTML or text-based e-mails to a list of recipients they upload to the system.
Those mailings can be dedicated e-mail blasts (such as you'd use to promote a special offer, for instance) or a regular newsletter. Campaigner includes a slew of templates for each.
The company said one of the most popular "blast" templates is Campaigner's postcard design -- listing six products and the prices for each.
For more advanced online marketers, Campaigner supports custom HTML e-mails -- so e-tailers can design mailings beyond the templates that GotMarketing offers.
"This gives [merchants] a lot of flexibility to use their own branding and images," a spokeswoman said. "But if they don't have their own capabilities, then they can use our templates. But you only have to know a little about HTML -- we have user guides that provide user tips and tricks."
Since sending e-mail is only half the battle, GotMarketing GotBuilder tool enables site owners to build or grow their lists. It provides a script that site owners can place with relative ease on their sites, which creates a Web form that allows visitors to register for newsletters or e-mail updates. When a visitor submits their e-mail address in the form, it's automatically added to the list maintained by GotMarketing.
Campaigner also offers a fairly robust reporting engine.
"You can get whatever information you need, from click-throughs, to click-throughs by URL, and information in terms of subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and hard- and soft-bounces," he said. Users "can pull up a report at any time -- it's got real-time reporting."
Going the self-service route might make sense for cost-conscious marketers, because GotMarketing doesn't need to employ a fleet of sales reps to walk customers through their campaigns -- and the savings can be passed onto clients.
GotMarketing charges a monthly fee for its services, on a sliding scale with campaign volume. Rates start at $25 per month, which provides for 2,500 e-mails and requires a six-month commitment. The company discounts with increasing volume, and also offers slightly more expensive no-commitment plans as well.
Kusano added that providing a self-service tool allowing small e-tailers to handle their own online marketing meshes well with the business philosophy espoused by those sorts of customers.
"With our SMB customers, it's amazing how self-reliant and independent they are," he said. "That's compared to our larger customers [who] often try to offload as much of the delivery ... as well as the creative side to us."
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of eCommerce-Guide.com.
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