Tools for Business Owners Who Work With Virtual Assistants: Newsletter and Email Marketing

When working with a professional virtual assistant, chances are you’ll delegate some or all of your marketing efforts to your VA, including newsletter and email marketing. There are numerous online services designed to help you get your marketing message out to your mailing list looking polished, and delivered more efficiently. An experienced virtual assistant will very likely already be familiar with at least one of the programs listed below:

MailChimp
With no fees at all for sending a campaign to up to 500 contacts and up to 12,000 emails per month, MailChimp is a great place for a small business on a budget to get started with newsletter marketing. It’s simple user interface makes it easy for beginners to craft professional looking templates, including customizations to include your brand’s color scheme and logo. Also comes loaded with pre-designed templates ready to use. Offers RSS to email, reports and tracking for sent campaigns, integration with Google Analytics and Facebook, and autoresponders. Click here for a complete list of MailChimp features. Aside from their ‘Forever Free’ plan, MailChimp also offers monthly subscriptions, pay-as-you-go, and high-volume plans.

Mad Mimi
Mad Mimi’s list of features includes the usual array of features: ready-made designer themes, autoresponders, tracking and reports, the ability to customize or code themes from scratch, full-featured list management options, campaign scheduling etc. It’s the ease of use and intuitive user interface that keeps Mad Mimi’s subscribers raving about the service. With a free plan that allows for up to 100 contacts, and an $8 a month plan for up to 500, Mad Mimi is certainly an affordable option. Have a ton of contacts? $36 a month allows for up to 10,000 – higher priced plans accommodate up to 350,000 contacts.

Constant Contact
Constant Contact may be one of the better known email marketing solutions available – with their huge advertising budget they’re hard to miss. Touted as a plug-and-play email marketing solution Constant Contact boasts the usual list of features and also offers a free 60 day trial. Paid plans start as low as $15 a month (allows for up to 500 contacts). While Constant Contact’s user interface is perhaps a bit more ‘clunky’ than some of the other options it is also the most full-featured of the services on our list. With event promotion (including attendee registration), and the ability to host surveys Constant Contact is undeniably a great business solution. The site provides an extensive Learning Center to help users make the most of all the Constant Contact has to offer.

iContact
iContact provides from 500 to 10,000 contacts starting at $10 a month and a 30-day free trial to help you get the hang of the system before you select a paid plan. The new ‘free edition’ account allows users with 500 or fewer contacts to take advantage of the iContact system for free, with some limitations to features. With integrated social tools, a survey feature, robust analytics and the ability to publish to the web as well as RSS to email iContact is a viable contender for small and large businesses. The site features webinars, an FAQ and tutorials and videos to help users leverage the power of iContact for their email marketing needs.

There are countless email marketing options out there – did we miss your favorite? Please feel free to let us know in the comments!