A blog about smart marketing and conversion optimization.

Having worked with a number of email marketing solutions, we thought it appropriate to put together an informal email marketing service roundup.

Let’s start with the bottom line: at Clever Zebo, we’re all about MailChimp as the easiest, most user-friendly email marketing tool when comparing apples to apples.

Constant Contact review

A classic, well-known email marketing solution, Constant Contact is very friendly to business owners but leaves something to be desired if you’re a veteran email marketer. Still, I’d rate it well overall and would recommend it to an email marketing novice because of its easy setup and modest pricing — you can always                                                  graduate to a more complex email marketing solution.

What we love:

• Easy to navigate, upload lists and craft emails
• Free trial with no credit card required
• Decent number of templates to choose from
• Solid customer support
• The email creation interface’s draggable, editable windows are a nice touch.

What we don’t love:

• Free trial only allows you 100 contacts, so you can’t gather any meaningful data from a test email campaign
• No good built-in mechanism for A/B testing
• Editing and formatting is finicky
• We should be able to copy and past editing WYSIWIG windows among different emails.

iContact review

iContact is, for the most part, painful to use. The user interface is clunky, very basic functionality, and preview doesn’t work correctly. We don’t recommend it.

MaxMail review

MaxMail is a decent tool, though there are some kinks to work out when it comes to the editing tools. What’s nice about it is the ability to do more than just send email blasts; you can create landing page lead forms, integrate with your social presence, etc.

We also love companies whose messaging is clear, sharp, gimmick-free and full of personality — and MaxMail does a nice job of talking to customers like they’re smart and capable.

What we love:

• Friendly messaging
• Sharp user-interface
• Because they’re a Canadian company (not covered by CAN-SPAM), less stringent list restrictions allow for more prospecting freedom
• Email automation functionality based on user behavior
• By hour granular open/click reporting
• Ambitious, passionate management team

What we don’t love:

• Buggy editing tools make designing emails difficult
• Only 4 pre-designed templates
• Less-stringent list restrictions put their shared servers at much higher risk of deliverability issues
• Pulling visual assets form a web page is not intuitive and the help functionality went to Not Found pages
• No A/B testing function
• 500 emails in the free trial is too few to get a good taste

MailChimp review

Mail Chimp is a winning email marketing solution. At the end of the day, their attention to excellent user experience, and maybe even more importantly, their avoidance of common UX pitfalls, make the application a pleasure to work with.

What we love:

• Incredibly easy and user-friendly
• Humor is part of the MailChimp experience
• The free trial, which allows you up to 12,000 emails per month, allows for a truly valuable experience with the tool and inspires confidence in the offering
• Analytics and tracking are integrated
• Reports are simple, easy to read, and don’t require download
• They have easy-to-use A/B testing

What we don’t love:

• We’re all about clean email lists, but their super-stringent deliverability policies are a little too aggressive for businesses in the process of vetting a list
• They’re not big on phone support, so you better be comfortable with email, chat, and Forums

ExactTarget review

Exact Target is an expert email platform for large-volume senders. You pay a premium for incredible deliverability and reputation, but it’s ultimately worth it.

What we love:

• Designed for large-volume senders
• Straight-forward interface provides you with the essentials but also allows for expansion such as API integration, automation rules, etc.
• Incredible deliverability on shared servers
• Knowledgeable, helpful deliverability team has the relationships and know-how to clean up snafus
• A human being picks up the customer service line
• Conversion tracking built in to reporting
• Send metering
• Extremely stable platform

What we don’t love:

• No automated A/B testing functionality
• Specialists are helpful when they get on the phone, but it’s a big company, and they can be hard to track down
• While they are trying to build out a lot of advanced functionality, the platform wasn’t designed to encompass the full suite of marketing automation, so they’re somewhere in the middle.

Marketo review

Generally, Marketo is labeled as a marketing automation solution, but email is a core component. As we have a bunch of experience with Marketo, we felt it was important to write up.

What we love:

• Awesome email automation functionality made simple by an intuitive user interface
• Super-deep reporting
• Full integration with SFDC
• Solid customer support
• A engaged user community helps drive product development and keep Marketo on its toes

What we don’t love:

• The platform is made for tens not hundreds of thousands of database records. If you have a million people in your database, expect load wait times.
• Marketo doesn’t fully support Salesforce.com custom objects, so beware.
• It’s really expensive as an email solution unless you’re a high-volume sender.
• They’re a fast-growing startup, and we encountered some technical issues. There are more stable email solution platforms out there, such as Exact Target.

Do you have experience with the email marketing solutions we mentioned, or comments on email tools we didn’t cover? Please tell us in the comments.

Last week David Rodnitzky wrote a blog post criticizing a deal we had run on Startups.com: $2,000 worth of consulting for $39 delivered in a 45-minute session. You can read his post and my response here. The post got me thinking about what marketing is really worth.

We’re at a strange juncture in the history of online marketing. On one hand, there are guys promising quality link-backs for pennies; on the other hand, there are paid search agencies charging tens of thousands of dollars per month. You can get a logo crowd-sourced for a couple hundred bucks or pay millions to a Madison Avenue agency for a re-brand. There are tech companies (again) receiving millions of dollars in funding against little or no revenue, and a seemingly endless cadre of social media marketers who bristle at the word “conversion.”

A number of firms have tried to commoditize online marketing services by rolling them into packages or blocks of time. For pretty much every one of Clever Zebo’s online marketing services, there are dozens of firms and consultants offering every price point from free to a small fortune for a package of deliverables or block of hours. Contrast this to in-house marketing professionals who are paid $50K to 6-figures+ per year to slog it out in an office and usually aren’t paid by the number of links they build, press releases they write, and dedicated ad groups they create. Employees are paid to be there every day and are bonused when the things they do can be tied to company success (or at least should be).

The point is that pricing in online marketing services remains highly subjective, and there just isn’t a good calculator that takes into account all the options out there and spits out the right one for your unique business situation (but that’s not a bad idea for a product). Paying cost-effectively for online marketing is an incredibly hard balancing act. Low-cost firms that make money have hundreds and thousands of customers and hope that repetition creates economies of scale that still generate client results. Silicon Valley agencies follow the big law model – put a couple big names in front of the client and bill out graduates at multiples of their salary.

Ultimately, there is no such thing as the RIGHT price, especially in services businesses, but there is the right match for you. Expense is relative; performance is everything. There is no “real” price tag for the time of an online marketing consult. With price, there’s only the equilibrium point between the results a client expects and the lengths we’re willing to go to make it happen.

You may have heard of the Sales Warrior, that mythical hero who makes 200+ phone calls, has a new prospect lunch every day, and then goes home to write a few proposals.

As phones go increasingly unanswered, Sales Warriors are adapting. Today’s sales warriors tweet 10 articles a day, host interesting meetups, and interact with hundreds at a time through webinars. You might say that Sales Warriors are becoming Social Media Magicians. Multi-faceted, multi-talented networkers unafraid of trying new media are revolutionizing how we sell.

The common characteristic is clever strategy backed up by hard work. Behind the social media magic of seemingly endless amplification is a lot of nitty gritty attention to detail, tenacity, and being will to try lots of approaches.

As Sales Warriors adapt to a world in which conversations bend and twist among 1-1, 1-n, n-1, n-n and back, the way we sell is transforming. It’s all communication, and the Sales Warriors willing to work some magic is running away with the show.