Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I'm not familiar with Arial, but if you host it yourself, you'll have to manage the autoresponders, opt-ins, opt-outs, tracking etc. yourself too. A service such as AWeber or Constant Contact will do it for about $20 a month (depending on the size of your list).

I work for an Email Service Provider (ESP) so I know the industry fairly well and I would say you are better of with a hosted service rather than an in-house software.

There are a number of reasons not least of which the risk is lower with going with an ESP. If you do not like the service, you simply cancel it (unless it is a service that requires a contract). If you install software it is harder to get untangled.

Another consideration is ESPs systems are generally optimized for sending a lot of email and have the hardware, bandwidth, and people to support it. This includes upgrades, etc. Unless this is your core business do you really wan to deal with those sorts of things?

I can imagine some situations where a software solution would be best but most of the time an ESP is the best route to take.

As always, the answer is not simple because factors effect the decision are not included.

What is the purpose? To communicate with your internal staff? To your existing patients? To new prospective patients?

Is the news letter to inform, to educate, to make people think you care, or is it to motivate people to run to the facility and get tested?

If just a simple news letter to the staff (small circulation) of the work schedule or new equipment in house is cool - cheap and easy to manage. If you informing/educating or are buying lists or have a large list it may be a toss up.

Do you care about the effectiveness I.e. will you be monitoring the ROI or not?

If it is for marketing where there is a result defined as new business, you definitely will find a 3rd party best because they can help you get past spam filters and most importantly get you stats on the effectiveness of your promotion.

So the old adage "it depends" seems to be spot on. Hope this gives you a thumb to how to evaluate the options.

FYI I had this dialog yesterday, "Post the full text memo on your site, and send out a bullet topic email with the title and a one liner, and 'click here...'" Make it easy to scan and let people open the topics they want. Don't send out a newsletter more frequently than once per week. Readers are overwhelmed with information, most of no interest to the readers. Most email is poorly written and most newsletters is hard to navigate. Information overload will shut your newsletter down as fast as any spam filter.

Spam