I’ve encountered a lot of clients lately that seem to be in an e-mail bind.  They all usually rely on an outside contractor to furnish, maintain, and send e-mails to their mailing lists.

Some are good.  Others offered e-mail marketing as an “add on,” though they really had no infrastructure to handle it.  In these cases, the relatively simple task of creating and sending e-mails to your clients or customers becomes annoyingly complex.

In one instance, a client’s previous web development company had a contract to handle e-mails, but because the size of the mailing had grown beyond their abilities, shortcuts had to be taken to make things run.  Mailings had to be sent out in batches: A-G one day, H-M the next day, and so on.  Imagine having to send out an important announcement, perhaps about an event cancellation.  What good will it be to the last batch of the alphabet when they receive the e-mail a day after the event?

Enter Constant Contact: “With our Email Marketing, you don’t need special technical or design skills to create html emails. If you can cut, paste, point and click, you’re good to go!  Start with any of our 400+ professional email templates, then make it your own with your logo, colors, and photos. Use your own imagery to start from scratch, or let us help you get you started with our custom services.”

With a tiered pricing structure, you can find the price that fits for your mailing list size.  Plans start at $15/month.  Take a look at Constant Contact’s features for a more specific overview.

If you’re looking for the ability to manage your own e-mail marketing with an easy interface, the ability to schedule e-mails, and virtually no limit on the number of e-mails you can send, Constant Contact has my recommendation.

To quote Google’s own website, “Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.”

If you’re in the business of knowing your website visitors, I recommend Google Analytics.  Whenever I talk to a client who needs statistics on visitors, I tell them about the “marketer’s dream” that is Analytics.

Let’s say you have a 10-page website.  Visitors start at the leading page, then you lead them through a series of pages before an eventual call to action, where they are encouraged to buy your product.

What if 95% of your visitors stop at page two?  What if they don’t even get that far?  To arm yourself with this kind of information, check out Analytics.  You’ll be amazed at the type of picture you can create about your visitors: locations, trends, loyalty, time spent on the site, and many, many more metrics.

To see for yourself, follow the directions on Google’s website, and contact your web developer to install the necessary tracking code.