The Official Mad Mimi Blog

Small biz at its best (an exept from Heather Rast's Insights and Enginuity, as featured on Marketing Profs)

For small businesses, it can be a challenge to look uber-polished and sophisticated with every communication and customer relationship tactic. If you’re also repositioning and rebranding the company as we are at Ovation, in many way’s it’s on par with a brand new start-up.  There’s the Web site, collateral, product sheets, trade show materials to develop. On another level is logowear, corporate gifts of various values, advertising for awareness and image building. There’s also the requisite trade associations, Chambers of Commerce, and more for networking.

The reality is that small business budgets are, well, smaller than that of their mid or large sized counterparts. With an eye on growth - that one “tipping point” win - small business marketers know they can’t afford to be overlooked.

Beautifully Simple

One area I’ve given a lot of thought to is email.  Done right, email can be a professional, relatively unobtrusive way to reach a variety of prospects, influentials, and existing customers. Many elements can be placed in a library and re-purposed for multiple “drops,” and of course there’s the power of the visual to draw a reader in (along with well-written content) and lead them to key landing pages.

But which provider was right for us? I had a few essential requirements when I started my search.

My Basic Criteria

1. Low monthly cost (or free!)
2. Flexible design and layout formats
3. Low-level coding requirements
4. Tracking and reports for insights
5. Flexible list management (we use Highrise for CRM)

The Little Red-Haired Girl

Mad Mimi: email with moxie

After a lot of evaluation (I confess, I didn’t understand the significance of some of the items listed on various feature sets) I narrowed my choices down to two. Running neck and neck (sharing many of my requirements, and each offering a few “something extra’s”), I chose MadMimi.

In just minutes late the other night, I pulled together a simple email sample and sent it to a few people. Using a few branded graphics I had easy access to, my new email had a masthead, intro paragraph, two stories (each with their own visual), and a footer. There’s no charge for a good long while (we’re still developing a list). It was easy to tell which of my recipients opened theirs (and which didn’t!), and also who forwarded it.  I can create separate campaigns for different purposes (say, a drip marketing program for customer development, routine emails for ongoing relationship management, etc.), maintain separate lists, and generate insightful reports that tie into site conversion funnels.

All of this may be all in a day’s work for many - email consultants, direct marketers specializing in digital, developers, and the like. But this was my very first hand’s on creation experience (it’s one thing to receive a slew of them, another to plan and create them for specific use cases!), and I have to say I’m jazzed at the potential. I’m only limited by the time and energy I have to focus on learning all the ins and outs. Not to mention watching the trends…

September 3, 2009 - by Rob Maguire - Nonprofit Communications

Facebook may have made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, but email is still king. Despite the rapid growth of online social networking, email has three times the reach, according to a new Forrester survey.

Even a space monkey could build beautiful newsletters using a service like Mad Mimi.

An email newsletter should hold a prominent role in every nonprofit’s communications strategy. The tools you use to create and send your message have a huge impact on whether it ever ends up in your recipients’ inboxes and how likely they are to read and act on it.

If you’re sending newsletters from your regular email account, the odds of being blacklisted are uncomfortably high. And if you’re building your own HTML newsletters from scratch, you’re probably wasting your time.

Hosted email marketing services are your best bet for quickly producing newsletters that are both pretty and powerful. There are a whack of great features common to many of these services that will help you:

Save time: most hosted services are so easy to use that a space monkey could put together an attractive, easy-to-read newsletter in minutes. Schedule your messages to send in the future, or even set up a drip campaign.

 

Track your emails: you’ll benefit from stats on open, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and can easily compare your campaigns to gauge effectiveness. Most services often useful charts, easy data exports, and integration with Google Analytics.

Manage your lists: easily add and remove individual subscribers or quickly import entire contact lists. They’ll handle your bounces and unsubscribe requests for you, and offer cut-and-paste forms for your website. Running split tests is a dream.

Be responsible: ensure your messages comply with spam legislation with features like confirmed opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, and removal of duplicate entries.

Have fun: many of these services have a playful interface and are a pleasure to use. You’ll look forward to crafting your messages and tracking the results once they’re sent.

Who’s who in email marketing

Now that you see a hosted service is the way to go, you’ve got a handful of good options. My personal pick is Mad Mimi. Along with a surprisingly intuitive interface and pricing that can’t be beat, they have the greatest customer service of any company I’ve ever done business with. (Thanks Dean and Gary!)

If Mimi ever croaked, I’d hook up with Emma. Her services are bit steeper, but she plants five trees for every new customer she receives, makes microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, and gives away twenty five accounts to deserving charities each year.

There’s also MailChimp, who offers a free library of email marketing guides to anyone who’s interested. When it comes to solid marketing advice, these guys don’t monkey around. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Now if you’re looking for oodles of features and full-service support — or your company frowns upon suppliers with funky, unique names — you might want to take a look at the pricier plans offered by Constant Contact and Bronto.

Many of these services offer free basic accounts to get you started, so sign up and start playing around. Once you see how fun and easy email marketing can be you’ll never send a hand coded email from Outlook again!

Disclaimer: I take part in the Mad Mimi affiliate program — but my love for her is true, I swear!

Thanks for the props Rob Maguire!

Mad Mimi was reviewed and rated this week by TopTenReviews.

We really like Mad Mimi, mostly because it is hassle free and refreshing. We like how easy and fast the service is; the newest of newbies can create an email campaign. As experienced reviewers for email marketing services, when we can look at this service we have a sense of wow, and commend Mad Mimi for their innovation and unique approach to email marketing.