Email Marketing Reviews Part 1
January 24, 2010 No CommentsI had one affiliate ask me a question:
I imagine you’ve got a bit of experience email marketing in the online casino space…interested in consulting at all?
I didn’t have a complete answer to the question but I promised to write an article comparing some of the services and resources available to help affiliates with their email lists. In my experience I have seen many email marketing programs used from both casino operators and affiliates. I started to search for reviews of some of the common programs and I hit a road block instantly. Either some of the review sites are owned by some of these programs or the affiliate comparing the programs are getting more incentives from a program to be listed as the best. Comparison charts are useful but they major ones seem to offer the same features.
So I decided to stop looking online because I felt the recommendations were biased with too many incentives affecting the recommendation. It was time to research what some top affiliates use and get some recommendations from affiliates I know. Now there are too many of these email marketing programs but there are 4 that I kept running into that are used by the top gaming affiliates:
| Email Programs | Review | Visit site |
|---|---|---|
| Constant Contact | Review Pending | Signup |
| AWeber | Review Pending | Signup |
| iContact | Review Pending | Signup |
| Vertical Response | Review Pending | Signup |
Each of these programs has approximately the same pricing but the features vary. Below I have made a chart of information I could find to try to compare each program. Hopefully this can help you decide which program is better suited for your needs. I focused on the features that would matter the most to gaming affiliates and only where these features differentiated to highly a program.
Featured Listings
| Comparison Chart | iContact | AWeber | Constant Contact | Vertical Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Double Opt-in | N/A | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Price 25,000 users | $149/month | $130/month | $150/month | $150/month |
| Demographic Segmentation | Yes | Yes | Yes | NO |
| Unicode Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | NO |
| Auto Responders | Yes | Yes | NO | NO |
| Conversion Tracking | NO | Yes | NO | Yes |
| Google Analytics Integration | NO | Yes | NO | Yes |
| A/B Testing | NO | Yes | No | Yes |
Conclusion
Each program seems identical to me but a few features I think stand out. Demographic segmentation is important if you want to target US players and rest of world. Conversion tracking is very important and I think feedback on your open rates is needed. A/B Testing is equally important as your list starts to grow. This is where you will want to do your own testing on 2 separate emails to see which one performs better.
Individual reviews will be coming in the future plus Part 2 of Email Marketing Reviews. In the next article I will be giving more details into each program including personal testing. I recommend that you sign up to the big 4 because each program gives you tutorials, white papers and more resources for improving your conversions.
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