5 Questions for a Mass Email Tool
When it comes to selecting the right mass email tool to complement your private capital CRM, the options can be a bit overwhelming. Certainly, there is no shortage of options available from simple mass-mail tools to full-blown marketing automation suites.
For our clients, we recommend you start by asking yourself these 5 questions.
1. How many people do I need to email?
Many mass email tools charge based on the number of emails you send or the number of unique email addresses you need to store. Knowing up front how many emails you’ll be sending can be a key part of predicting how much a subscription will cost. If you’re already a Salesforce.com user, you can send a few hundred emails a day (depending on your license) right out of Salesforce for no additional cost.
2. How often will I need to send emails to those people?
Since most mass email tools charge a monthly subscription fee, companies that only send one email a quarter or one email every few months might get more value from a service that charges a small fee per email.
3. Do you want to know who opens emails, unsubscribes, and shares the emails?
Most mass email tools will provide some analytics around open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates with some tools even going so far as to track what emails were shared and whether they were shared via email or perhaps through social media. Typically this functionality is relevant to more traditional marketing departments that are mailing hundreds of thousands of addresses, but savvy fund managers can get some insights from these types of statistics. If you’re interested in tracking analytics, we recommend starting small and working your way up to the complicated stuff.
4. Do we want it to integrate with our CRM?
This is a big one for us, since all of our clients use Salesforce.com. A tight integration with your CRM can save your team hours of manual importing and exporting. For Salesforce users, ideally, you’ll want to be able to build your email list right from Salesforce. It may also be important to you to be able to see a record of what mass emails any given contact has received in the past. Any mass email tool that claims to integrate with Salesforce should be able to tell you upfront whether or not these things are possible.
5. Do we want to send HTML emails or just plain text?
Most mass email tools do give you the ability to send HTML emails. If you’re mass emailing out of Salesforce, however, there isn’t a real user-friendly way to build more complex HTML templates like you can do with other systems. If you’re considering a mass email tool that doesn’t have a good HTML builder, you’ll want to make sure you have a resource available that can build HTML for you.
Click here for more information about Altvia’s private equity mass email tool, Correspond Market Edition.
