The new SendGrid Marketing Email service, launching Tuesday, will rely on the same infrastructure SendGrid already uses for the 8 billion transactional messages it sends monthly. But, unlike its transactional email service, this new offering targets non-techie marketing people, not developers.

A company’s marketing staff can opt for one of several newsletter templates, “build” the content using a drag-and-drop interface, and create mailing lists. According to a statement about the new service, once the newsletter is ready to roll:

… marketers can distribute to their entire list in seconds and view campaign performance in real-time via SendGrid’s newsletter analytics dashboard, which provides insight into delivery rates, opens, clicks, click-through rates, unsubscribe requests and more.  Similar to SendGrid’s transactional email service, technical users can leverage an API for the marketing email service and forgo the online interface.

SendGrid’s pitch is that it will all do this for less than competitors like MailChimp or Constant Contact because it will charge based on how much mail is sent and not on the size of the subscriber list.

Given that tech vendors see Chief Marketing Officers and their minions controlling more of the IT budget, it makes sense to build tools tailored for that constituency. That trend is also driving quite a bit of M&A activity as evidenced by Salesforce.com’s recent $2.5 billion buyout of ExactTarget early this month.

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When you’re in Atlanta, as I was during a recent trip, the obvious place to start talking about orange juice and data is with Coca-Cola. Foreman can tell you all about how the beverage giant — whose headquarters tower over the city just a just a mile away from MailChimp’s office — uses advanced algorithms and giant vats of different juices to ensure the proper flavor of its Simply Orange line of orange juice. However, it’s something else Coca-Cola is doing that inspired the way Foreman thinks about data and that’s helping MailChimp re-imagine what it means to engage with fans, readers and customer through their inboxes.

Anyone familiar with how large web companies came to pioneer the practice of what we now call “big data” should appreciate the analogy. Coca-Cola, which also owns Minute Maid, produces a lot of excess pulp when it makes orange juice. For decades, presumably, it had just been throwing that pulp away, but in 2006 it decided to make use of it by launching a new product called Minute Maid Pulpy. Sold primarily in Asian countries, Pulpy has become a billion-dollar business for Coca-Cola.

Once MailChimp is done with its primary business of sending emails, it has a lot of pulp of its own in the form of data. And rather than just ignoring it or writing up some cute blog posts (which he also does), Foreman and his bosses want to turn that data into revenue.

First things first: Making better orange juice

Neil Bainton

Actually, though, MailChimp first brought in Foreman in 2011 to help the company improve its core business of letting users build and send their emails. MailChimp’s culture was built around many things, COO Neil Bainton told me, but data wasn’t one of them. It had “various fits and starts” through the years trying to work data into its business model, and each step just added more complexity.

The challenges were technological as well as cultural, but Foreman had a plan, of which focus was a key aspect. Keeping a tight focus meant Foreman and his lone-developer sidekick could build what they needed to in a short timeframe. It also meant the company didn’t have to worry about some massive overnight transformation into a data-obsessed company like Google.

John Foreman

“[They] don’t need to be afraid the entire culture is gonna fall down if we bring in this weird math guy,” he joked.

Foreman’s first project — deploying artificial intelligence models that would automatically detect spammy email lists from MailChimp’s users – is actually critical to the way MailChimp operates, though. It was up and running in production within a year, after a technologically challenging effort of merging separate database instances for each customer into a single environment that would let MailChimp run complex analyses across its customer base.

It’s such an important project, Foreman explained, because internet service and email providers keep reputation scores on the IP addresses that send email through their systems. Because MailChimp serves as the email engine for its millions of users, sending too many messages that get flagged as spam and lower MailChimp’s reputation will have a negative impact on everyone. The company used to deal with spam manually, and only after recipients began complaining about the messages they received.

“It used to be before we had that AI model in place that everyone had a crappier experience,” Foreman said.

Say goodbye to those ’90s fans, Pearl Jam

Source: MailChimp

Now, however, MailChimp knows some of the telltale signs of spam for which it should be on the lookout. If too high a percentage of email addresses on a given list are also available via publicly available lists or those you can buy on sketchy corners of the internet, it’s probably spam. Too many old and far-more-likely-to-be-dead Earthlink or Compuserve addresses, or letters within one keystroke of each other as if someone just mashed the keyboard? Probably spam.

Thankfully, though, about 98 percent of the spam that MailChimp identifies is what Foreman calls “ignorant” — that is, people or companies that just don’t know the laws or best practices around sending emails. But ignorance doesn’t mean MailChimp relaxes its rules. Recently, it even flagged Pearl Jam for spammy practices because the band was trying to reconnect with old fans whose email addresses read like a who’s who list of 1990s email providers.

Having such a high percentage of ignorant spam actually has a positive effect on the company’s overall goal of monetizing its vast data repositories. Because the AI model automates what used to be a manual process, and because most innocent spammers will fall in line quickly once they’re notified (as opposed to nefarious spammers who constantly try to outsmart the system), MailChimp can pretty much set the model loose, forget about it and get to work on new efforts, Foreman said.

Now, about that pulp

Spam under control, MailChimp can focus its efforts on actually building new products with data, just like Coca-Cola did with that extra pulp. One of its first orders of business is figuring out how to help customers get to know better the people to whom they’re sending their newsletters.

With this in mind, the company built a service called Wavelength that shows customers other newsletters that are similar to theirs. But the system that powers Wavelength also stores pretty much every interaction that every email address in the company’s database has with the newsletters they’re sent. That means what emails they open and when they open them, what links they click and when they click them, and what other newsletters they’re subscribed to. MailChimp also has a feature called Ecommerce360 that lets customers track clicks right through to conversions (marketing speak for someone actually buying something).

The company has been playing around with this data to identify clusters of users based on their behaviors and their interests — some of which Foreman has detailed on the company’s blog — and now it wants to roll it out to customers via a product MailChimp is calling ChimpQuery. Built atop Google’s BigQuery analytics service, ChimpQuery will let customers start doing this type of clustering and segmentation on their own, while saving MailChimp the troubles of hosting that infrastructure itself. (You can play with a monstrous, interactive graph of the entire MailChimp subscriber list here.)

If you sell knitting supplies and you find out there’s a big cluster of people on your mailing list who also are interested in wedding planning and custom jewelry, there might be an opportunity to create your content with these interests in mind or even to partner with companies in those spaces.

A sample cluster of subscribers.

Another topic that has been on Foreman’s mind lately is what he calls “frequency elasticity of engagement.” He’s done research suggesting that blasting the heck out of your email list might actually have detrimental effects in the long term (regardless of how the Obama campaign successfully exploited this strategy) but noted that engagement also has a lot to do with content and a particular company’s given user list. MailChimp’s data could help customers figure out the ideal schedule for emailing their subscribers.

For example, Birchbox has really high engagement because people love the service and have to open their emails to find out what goodies they’re receiving. Emails from a company like Papa John’s, on the other hand, might sit in someone’s inbox essentially as spam until they want to order a pizza and go searching for a coupon. Everyone has to figure out what pace and engagement metrics work for them.

Reining expectations back in

However, now that management is fully sold on the power of data, Foreman sometimes finds himself managing expectations rather than just pitching his ideas. COO Bainton, for example, is adamant that MailChimp start aiding its publishing-industry customers by using techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic analysis to help them personalize emails based on readers stated and unstated interests (that is, what boxes they check when they sign up and what stuff they actually click on).

Foreman, well, he’s pretty sure that’s too big a challenge for MailChimp to tackle considering how many publishing customers it has. MailChimp would have to understand all those customers’ industries to some degree (open source tools tend to highlight technically but not situationally relevant relationships, he said, and don’t always understand things like sarcasm) and probably the different languages they publish in, as well. Rather than understand content, he’d rather focus personalization efforts around how users are connected.

The company also needs to balance its ambitions with what’s legally and socially acceptable. The creep factor might be more important than what’s legal when it comes to email marketing. MailChimp determines the legality of everything it does before rolling it out, Foreman explained, but in era of “post-modern spam” where legitimacy is in the eye of the recipient and where some people use their “spam” button as a proxy for unsubscribing, companies must be careful not to offend.

“The more we can tell you about that list without getting creepy is really useful,” Bainton said. However, he added, ”I think expectation is more important than law.”

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In November, the company launched a first-of-its kind platform for delivering dynamic real-time ads via email. And, expanding its advertising capabilities, LiveIntent last week released a new platform allowing publishers and advertisers to target and bid for email subscribers no matter where they are on the Web – in emails and beyond.

The platform, called LFX, gives publishers the tools to sell against their subscribers anywhere they are on the Web. It also gives advertisers a way to buy subscribers as they would other kinds of premium display inventory. With LFX, publishers’ direct ad sales teams, as well as DSPs (demand-side platforms) and agency trading desks can buy and bid for a publishers’ subscribers.

“The email subscriber is the most loyal customer,” said Dave Hendricks, COO of LiveIntent. Not only has the subscriber opted-in to receive communication, email subscribers are more likely to click on the messages a business sends them and therefore more likely to make purchases or visit monetized websites.

Loyal subscribers can also generate positive ripple effects for marketers by forwarding along messages to friends and family, Hendricks said.

Email messages with LiveIntent tags generate 30 percent more impressions post decision (or after the initial email open), the company reports, indicating that the subscriber either opened the message again or passed it along to a contact who viewed the same ad. LiveIntent also says average click-through rates for its email ads are about 0.3 percent, which is about three times the average click-through rate for online display ads.

But while the company may tout the value of the email sharing, it’s hard to ignore the increasing power of sharing through Facebook, Twitter and other emerging social platforms. According to 2011 data from sharing platform ShareThis, Facebook generated 38 percent of sharing referral traffic, while email contributes just 17 percent and Twitter accounts for 11 percent.  Additionally, with the proliferation of daily deal and flash sale sites – and the flood of emails that they beget – consumers may view sifting through their inboxes as an increasingly unwelcome chore.

Adrian Tompsett, VP of business development for DSP DataXu, said the controlled environment of an email and the opt-in orientation of a subscriber makes email a promising vehicle for marketers. But he added that performance depends on a wide range of variables, from the marketers’ overall strategy to the specific message in a given email. Another potential question could also be scale as, presumably, the amount of online premium display and video inventory is much larger than premium email inventory. But LiveIntent says it counts more than 100 premium publishers on its platform and Tompsett said it seems to be effectively building the scale it needs.

Personal finance startup LearnVest (one of LiveIntent’s publishers) declined to provide specific data showing LiveIntent’s effectiveness. But Jacquelyn White, VP of advertising for LearnVest, said the platform was enabling her company to use its rich data about users to provide a premium experience to advertisers via email and draw high engagement rates.

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The company is announcing the release of LiveIntent for Publishers on Wednesday, a self-serve tool that allows companies that send out email newsletters, notifications and other communications  to place ads served up in real time like display ads. They can now manage their email ad inventory in much the same way they handle display advertising, deciding whether to run in-house ads for marketing purposes or third-party ads to drive revenue.

LiveIntent has overcome some of the barriers of advertising in emails, which don’t support iframes, JavaScript, Flash and cookies consistently. That has prevented the kind of ad serving that brings fresh and targeted ads to email that’s the norm online. But LiveIntent has managed to break through these barriers and can now serve up ads based on the context of when the email is opened. That means an ad can reflect the time of day and other cues and remains fresh no matter when it’s opened. A publisher drops live tags into their email newsletters and notifications that provide information about the recipient include age range, income, geography and what kind of device the email is being viewed on. LiveIntent then enforces rules set by the publisher and serves the appropriate ads from its server.

With LiveIntent for Publishers, companies can now achieve total sell-through of their email ad inventory, something that was extremely hard to do before. And they can fetch higher CPMs than if they tried to place ads themselves. If they want to control their own ads, they can do so themselves through LFP, or they can tap LiveIntent’s real-time premium ad exchange, which allows advertisers, agencies, demand-side platforms and trading desks to bid on these impressions.

For advertisers, they can now effectively target specific email audiences and different times of the day with dynamic and rich media ads that can be spread out over many publishers. It can simplify the work for advertising operations employees and provide them with reach with some premium publishers including MSNBC, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Medianews, which are some of the companies that have been using LiveIntent for Publishers in beta.

LiveIntent makes money by taking a cut of the revenues from publishers. Matt Keiser, CEO and co-founder of LiveIntent, said companies can turn their email inventory into revenue generators by leveraging LiveIntent. He said there’s a huge opportunity in email advertising that hasn’t been tapped yet, with 225 million Americans using email, increasingly on mobile devices. He said it could be up to an $11 billion opportunity if publishers can get average revenue per user similar to online display ads.

“We’re not so bold to say we’re creating an entirely new business model, but what we’re doing is we’re tapping into the ecosystem that exists. The killer app on the Internet and the killer app on mobile is email. People are more receptive to email marketing from commercial entities than they are compared to any other method. Email is the best place for a commercial company to reach you,” he said.

LiveIntent raised $8 million in September in a Series B funding round led by Shasta Ventures. It has raised a total of about $13 million from  Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Grape Arbor.

I think there’s a big opportunity in serving up real-time ads into email. As I wrote before with Movable Ink, another New York company bringing live content to email, emails start becoming stale the moment they’re sent and don’t reflect the latest information. But ads that are context-aware and live provide a sizable advertising opportunity and an appealing way for publishers to start making money from their emails. There’s always the danger that this can turn off readers and prompt them to open emails less but I think for many people, they’re still used to checking emails, and this is a chance to really capitalize on what’s been a largely untapped opportunity.

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Movable Ink creates a live container that can live inside emails, letting companies share current and relevant information from their websites with users based on time, location, social context and what kind of device they’re using. That allows emails to remain current and alive long after they’ve been sent.

The company plans to use the money to build out its platform and move into verticals such as retail, publishing, travel, ticketing and events. It’s also been seeing a lot of interest from email providers who are looking at the technology as a differentiator.

As mentioned, Movable Ink is also launching an app gallery: a collection of apps that companies can embed in their emails that are designed for specific common tasks like counting down to the end of a sale, showing the latest tweets from a company or showing a map with points of interests based on a user’s location.

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The crux of the situation is that some of ExactTarget‘s servers went down, resulting in an inability for many Groupon subscribers to click through on the links on their daily e-mails to actually review and make purchases. Josic explained to me that customers only engage with Groupon’s servers after ExactTarget processes the initial mouse click, so if that service is down, customers never make it to the Groupon site. He said the outage appears to have begun some time on Saturday, although Groupon confirmed with him that it has been resolved as of this morning. Indeed, the low numbers that Josic cited when posting have picked up — sometimes only minimally — throughout the morning.

However, they still weren’t up to par as of around 9 a.m. PDT, said Josic, whose site tracks the group-buying space very closely. He thinks this means one of two things: either ExactTarget’s service is still not fixed, or scorned customers aren’t checking back in to see if they’re able to access their deals now. The latter, said Josic, is a particularly troubling proposition for Groupon.

What’s certain is that Groupon subscribers could have accessed the deals directly through Groupon at any time since the outage began simply by visiting Groupon.com. Groupon’s official response, both to me and to Josic, is, “We weren’t the only clients affected by the outage. While some customers may not have been able to click through the e-mail to the website, they could always go to Groupon.com to purchase.” In fact, DealFind, another ExactTarget customer, appears to be suffering from slow sales, too.

That subscribers could have, but didn’t, visit the sites leads Josic to believe that “the brand almost means nothing; it’s all about the subscriber.” Subscribers, it seems, are willing to consider deals that come to them, but aren’t necessarily willing to do the legwork to track them down themselves, even if it means the relatively pain-free task of visiting the Groupon site. I don’t know if this affects Groupon’s fate as its IPO approaches, but it certainly says something about the fickleness of its customers’ buying habits if Josic’s assessment is accurate. Groupon and other group-buying services might need to figure out a way to engage with customers on its site without relying on the e-mail middleman.

Josic said the outage likely led to significant revenue losses in the cities affected. DailyDealMedia is in the process of analyzing the weekend’s numbers against its existing set of Groupon sales data to estimate the ultimate effect.

Of course, this situation also says something about the inherent risk in outsourcing any critical business processes to a third party. We saw an even larger-scale outage in April regarding Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing platform, which downed many popular web sites almost completely for days. Performing a service isn’t inherently more reliable and probably requires a lot more effort, but at least companies have a modicum of control when it comes to resolving this type of performance issue. Josic noted, though, that Exact Target doesn’t have a history of service interruptions as far as he’s aware.

That means Groupon’s biggest problem probably isn’t keeping its services up and running, but getting customers to view it as something more than a daily e-mail coupon.

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First Scenario: A List of Loyal Followers

In the first scenario, you build a following. You have a web site, a blog, maybe a few social networking profiles, and people within your target audience begin to follow your posts and updates. Eventually, they become so interested in what you have to say that they sign up to receive your email newsletter so that they can stay in the loop on everything going on with you and your business.

Once a month or so, you send out your email newsletter. It has a couple of helpful articles that are relevant to your target audience, as well as information about a featured product or service that might interest your readers.

Month after month, your readership grows. Your newsletter is a welcomed extension of your efforts as an endless resource for your following.

Second Scenario: Free Download With Sign-Up

In the second scenario, you have a new product that’s about to launch. Let’s call it your “Yoga for Beginners” e-book. You go through the first few weeks of getting the word out about your new e-book, directing people back to your web site where they can download it by signing up to receive your newsletter. Since you’re doing a big promotional push for the launch, you’re introducing yourself to new audiences, but it seems to be going well, since your mailing list is growing steadily.

A few weeks go by, and you send out an email newsletter called “Stretches That Really Work” that includes a great affiliate product that you think might interest your readers. It’s very relevant to your subscribers, and you’ve tried the product and absolutely love it. The day after you send the campaign, though, you get several unsubscribes, so many that your email marketing company sends you a warning that they’re now monitoring your account. What went wrong?

A Clear Divide?

Are there, in fact, two “sides” to email marketing, two separate schools of thought? If there are and you set up camp on the “loyal following” side of the fence, is it ever safe to cross over without alienating your followers? If you decide to go the “free download with sign-up” route, is there a way to avoid coming across as spam, or getting so many unsubscribes that you get flagged by your email marketing company?

Are there distinct sides to email marketing, or is it possible to find a balance and “ride the fence?” Please share your thoughts.

Photo by Flickr user tibchris, licensed under CC 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

1. Provide something of value. Your readers subscribed for a reason. Now it’s your time to shine. Provide them with consistently high-quality content. Give them something that will actually help them in their lives or businesses.
2. Be interesting. Think before you post. Would you want to read this? Will it capture their attention and make them want to continue reading? Don’t be bland. Provide helpful information that your readers will actually look forward to receiving.
3. Be personal. You don’t have to disclose personal details about your life, but it’s helpful to have a more personal conversation. Pretend you’re putting this newsletter together for your friend. Think about a particular (preferably your ideal) client as you compose your articles. Act like you’re having a face-to-face conversation with him or her.
4. Take an interest. If you’re not in the mood to put together a newsletter, don’t do it, or at least step back and check your attitude before you begin. Remember that people actually subscribe to it and may even look forward to it. Remember that this will help your business and help you build better connections with your followers. Take an active interest in providing a high-quality newsletter with each and every issue.
5. Don’t be too “sales-y.” While you definitely want to take the opportunity to let them know about your products and services or any special promotions you’re running, you don’t want to go overboard.Keep a balance between content and promoting yourself. Think in terms of ratios, maybe 80 percent content to 20 percent promotion.
6. Be a resource. Provide links to other articles, videos and podcasts that are relevant to your audience. Devote an entire section to resources that might help them in their businesses.
7. Don’t make it too long. Try to limit your newsletters to no more than five or six articles. Otherwise, your readers will likely skip around and not read every section.
8. Provide a consistent format. Think about regular columns or sections you could provide in each issue of your newsletter. The more consistent you are with your format, the more likely that your subscribers will start to anticipate it and look for those sections, kind of like their favorite magazine columns or newsletter sections.
9. Try to get them to act. Be sure to provide some special discount or offer to your readers that encourages them to take action, whether that’s to refer a friend or make a purchase.
10. Ask for feedback. Every once in a while, ask readers how you’re doing. See if there’s any way you could improve the newsletter so that it’s more helpful to them. Remember that comments and replies are a good way of gauging the effectiveness of your message as well.
11. Be consistent. Stick to a regular schedule. I like to send my newsletters on the third Wednesday of each month. That way, I know there’s no chance the date will fall on a weekend (like if I did them on the 1st of each month, for instance), I provide myself a few weekdays’ cushion to get it done (and it’s not on a Friday, when I’m wanting to get out the door), and it’s easy for me and my readers to remember.

Newsletters can be an effective way to maintain and build relationships with your customers and prospects. You just have to be consistent in providing valuable content on a very regular basis. If you do, you’re guaranteed to get quality face time with people who want to hear your message and are already interested in doing business with you.

How do you ensure that you maintain a high-quality newsletter? What regular features do you include to keep readers interested?

Image from Flickr by by Jolante

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There have been times when I’ve pulled out all the marketing stops and still had my newsletter outperform every other medium. I think there are a few reasons for this.

1. The people who are receiving your newsletter really want to receive it. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, but I subscribe to very few newsletters. The ones I do subscribe to generally get read quite intensively. Why? Because I’m interested in the message of that particular person or company, and I probably enjoy the format of that particular newsletter (layout, content, regular sections, etc.). When I receive one of these few newsletters, it’s like receiving one of my favorite magazines, and I enjoy browsing it cover to cover in hopes of finding one new nugget of information that might help me in my life or business.
2. You get their undivided attention. When I read a newsletter, I generally have waited until I have time to focus on it, as I do with my favorite magazines. I don’t want to feel rushed or distracted, so I’ll save it in my email box until I have time to look over it. Even though I may not read every single article, the ones I do read get my undivided attention, which means I’m much more likely to take action on the article than when I’m browsing news and blog feeds.
3. It’s more personal. Getting a newsletter is a little like receiving a letter in the mail, and even though you know that a lot of other people receive it, there’s just something more personal and inviting about a newsletter over a blog entry, podcast, video or tweet. Maybe because it comes to your private email box, you can read it privately, and then send a somewhat private message back to the sender, should you decide to do so.
4. The pump has been primed. Anyone who subscribes to your newsletter is already interested in you, your company and its services. If they’ve been waiting on the fence for the right timing to act on your offer, you stand a good chance of capturing their business when they are ready to act.
5. It feels like an inside scoop. For whatever reason, newsletters seem a lot more exclusive than blogs and other media. Maybe it’s the personal and private thing again, but whatever it is, readers feel like they’re getting first-hand information directly from the horse’s mouth. That provides two opportunities. One, they’re likely to be watching for sweet deals and offers from you and your company. Two, if they do get “juicy inside information,” they’re way more likely to spread it around than if it were in a blog entry “for all the world to see.”
6. They can be forwarded (and perhaps are more likely to be). While a lot of people understand about sharing blog entries with others, forwarding an email is dead simple, so it’s much more likely that a newsletter will be forwarded onto someone if the reader thinks the recipient will benefit from it.

While I am a big advocate for blogging, I think newsletters are an equally powerful tool that can be used in a slightly different way to leverage your marketing efforts.

Do you have a newsletter? How has it helped you in promoting your business?

Image from Flickr by mpclemens

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For one of my new projects, I had to sign up for GetResponse, an email marketing service. Since I had to get a subscription anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could use the app to improve my freelance practice. Email newsletters are often used for product promotion, so why not use it to  market my services?

While it might seem to be too late for me to hop on the email marketing bandwagon, I see very few options that offer the same effectiveness for reaching my customers, particularly with my client base. Many of my clients aren’t tech savvy, which means they don’t have social-networking accounts, so I can’t contact them using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, I doubt that many of them return to my web site after we’ve started working together.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of my email marketing campaign, I had to plan what kind of messages I would send to my customers. Here’s what I came up with:

Provide general business information to clients. Educating our clients is always a good thing. It’s not enough to just give them our work output — I have to teach them how to use it well. But this often burdens me with hours of repetitive tech support. With the use of email marketing services, I can keep clients updated with the latest industry trends, as well as what they can do to adapt.

Promote new work. An email list can also be a good venue to tell others about the current work you’re doing. Did you just publish a new book? Are you launching another web app? It’s a good way to promote your new projects and show your clients how much you’re growing professionally. After all, the more skills you learn and the more experience you gain, the better you’ll be able to help their business.

Share feedback. If a client writes to you and tells you that your work increased their sales by 150 percent, wouldn’t you be proud of it? Just make sure that you have a client’s consent before featuring their comments on your newsletter.

You don’t have to share purely positive feedback, either. You can mention client complaints, but include the steps you took to fix the problem, and what your client had to say after. This brings some honesty into your testimonials, and should make them stand out from the usual testimonials that skeptical clients tend to gloss over.

Hand out exclusive offers. You can also use your mailing list to send out exclusive offers that will alert inactive clients to any new services or products you are offering. In my experience, it’s more effective to contact people who already know you and have worked with you before. They’ll always be more comfortable about rehiring you, compared with new prospects who have never heard of you.

During my first year as a freelancer, I ran into a “dry spell” for a couple of months. I had no new leads, and my current clients didn’t seem to need any work from me. While I didn’t subscribe to an email marketing service, I used my email contact list and sent out a message offering some of my services for a small discounted fee if they sent me successful referrals. I received several new, referred clients, and, thanks to the discount,  several existing clients were encouraged to rehire me for future projects.

Learn the interest level of your customers. While some of the tips above could be done just by sending emails with your regular email client, tracking your clients’ interest level is something you can only do with an email marketing service. You can check who opens your messages, clicks the links embedded in your emails (and which links they click on), or buys something through your site.

Like any other communication tool, mailing lists shouldn’t be abused or you risk losing your audience. As long as you’re providing value to your subscribers, your messages will always be welcome in their inboxes.

Do you use email newsletters or email marketing software to keep in touch with clients? If so, how has it affected your business?

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