“You don’t have to have people with intensive training.” Associations, obviously, have been doing this email thing for a long time, so there are a lot of folks familiar with the process. But one phenomenon that could shake things up a bit on the email front in the coming years is the rise of cloud-based email distribution platforms. Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), for example, offers an API-based interface for sending emails, much like you might use Amazon Web Services for other cloud offerings. Problem is, SES isn’t easy to use on its own. Make Design Less Painful Of course, sending emails isn’t the only headache that comes with email marketing. Another challenge that causes problems is the production process. Building emails, as I’ve written before, is effectively like designing websites with technology only available before 2002. Fortunately, Google has made strides around that problem. The tools listed above may not be the ones that work for you, but they should inspire you to at least open up your mind about the email production and acquisition process, just like a trip to Really Good Emails might. Email is gaining some major prominence as a marketing tool, but (like web design) you can’t keep doing the same thing.
Long neglected as part of the communications conversation, emails have become more essential than ever in 2017. But the ground is still messy. Read on for some suggestions on to improve your email production workflow.
Here’s a bit of a conundrum to start out the year: Despite all the complaints about email filling up our inboxes and generally annoying us, email newsletters and marketing messages are doing pretty well from an attention-grabbing standpoint.
But email—in ways different from Twitter, Facebook, or even your blog platforms—is incredibly challenging to work with from a production standpoint.
Part of the problem is that, in the case of Facebook, there’s one standardized way to send a Facebook post into the world. But with email, there are myriad ways to both send and receive emails, and the complicated production process can throw folks for a loop.
A recent article in Digiday underlines this point pretty well. A number of major media outlets, finding the process of making emails cumbersome and limited as far as data goes, have invested in significant amounts of technology. In The New York Times’ case, it’s been using such a platform, internally called Paperboy, for more than a decade—just to make the production process bearable.
“It’s made a huge difference in the ability to put out high-quality email newsletters in a short space of time and the potential to spread that out to a large group,” the Financial Times’ Andrew Jack told the website. “You don’t have to have people with intensive training.”
Associations, obviously, have been doing this email thing for a long time, so there are a lot of folks familiar with the process. But the problem is, it can be a challenge to understand all the nuances of building a useful email. And let’s face it: Most associations simply don’t have the resources of the Times.
So with that in mind, I wanted to update you guys on a few tools and a few current best practices for email production and acquisition. Read on for some useful tips.
The problem with email distribution in the modern day is that it can become a very expensive proposition, especially if your audience is large. You pay for the ease of use that comes with Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, for example.
But one phenomenon that could shake things up a bit on the email front in the coming years is the rise of cloud-based email distribution platforms. Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), for example, offers an API-based interface for sending emails, much like you might use Amazon Web Services for other cloud offerings.
Why would you want that? Simply, it’s cheap: The service allows you to send 62,000 messages each month for free (which is about 12 messages per user each month, if you have 5,000 people on your list), and prices from there are 10 cents per thousand messages. Theoretically, you could send a million emails in a single month for just $100.
Problem is, SES isn’t easy to use on its own. But this is where things get interesting: A number of startups are offering front-end interfaces to SES, giving them…
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