Web Site Design Services: Newsletter Services
We offer a great service that will help to market your business to your viewers and customers. Our newsletter service is very easy to use, and very affordable, with no monthly fees. You pay only when you send the newsletter. We set up a newsletter "template" for you to use, and send you a tutorial video on how to use it. We can put a newsletter sign up form on your web site. Then when you are ready, send out a newsletter. It's one of the best ways to stay in contact with your customers.
The cost?
To design your template it is our regular hourly design fee. So is the the coding to put a sign up form on your web site. Usually it is no more than one hour.
To send the email newsletter is $10 per campaign, and $.05 per email sent. That's it.
Interested? Send us an email.
Already signed up for our "createsend" service? You can sign into your account from here:
A second service that we have recently partnered with is RatePoint.
With RatePoint, small businesses can easily accomplish their sales, marketing, and customer service objectives – while staying connected with customers to build consumer trust and improve retention and repeat business
RatePoint’s Web-based solution allows businesses to manage their online reputation by easily collecting, managing, and promoting consumer reviews and feedback directly on their Website. Additionally, the robust suite of tools offers email marketing and surveys – plus a Web-based console complete with reporting tools.
Small businesses can easily promote customer feedback and business reviews, send great looking email newsletters and promotions, and create surveys all with one easy to use package – all for one low monthly price.
RatePoint's customer feedback tools will improve your business and your sales. Learn more today and sign up for a 30-day FREE trial
OUR WEB SITE DESIGN SERVICES:
Standard brochure/informational web site design for your small business.
E-commerce for your web site
Content management options for your web site
Wordpress blog for your web site design
Newsletter Services
Our email newsletter information:
All newsletter subscriber list accounts are limited to 500 subscribers before they will need approval
How does the approval process work?
We go to great lengths to ensure we can offer you a reliable service with great deliverability. An incredibly important part of this effort is ensuring our serviceis never abused by spammers, and also to ensure the "good guys" are behaving themselves and sticking to best practice.
How the approval system works
Before you can send your first larger campaign (to more than 500 recipients or so), a member of our approval team will need to check out your creative and subscriber list to ensure it complies with our anti-spam policy.
We do this by asking you to answer two quick questions after you've imported your campaign content and set the recipients for that campaign. You'll notice an alert pointing you to these questions at the top of the Campaign Snapshot, like the screenshot below.
Clicking the link in this notice, or proceeding to the next step in the Create/Send process will take you to an approval form just like the one below.
As soon as you complete the form and provide us with an answer about how you obtained permission to contact your recipients, an email will be instantly sent to our approvals team. They can then check out your creative, subscriber list and the explanation provided.
9 times out of 10 they will approve your campaign on the spot and send you an email confirming the campaign will be ready to send. This is normally a one-off process, but you may need to be reviewed again if you send to a significantly larger list. In most cases this process shouldn't take more than 12 hours to complete.
How can I get approval in advance to avoid any delays?
To get your campaign reviewed and approved in advance, we recommend going through the steps mentioned above (actually creating the campaign, importing the content and selecting the recipients) a day or two before you plan on sending the campaign. This will give our team more than enough time to approve your design and also leave plenty of time for you to make any changes we might occasionally request.
Our Email Newsletter Anti-Spam Policy
We take permission very seriously. By creating an account you are also agreeing to this anti-spam policy.
The law isn’t enough, it’s permission that counts
While the CAN-SPAM laws are a step in the right direction for reducing the spam problem, we don’t feel they go far enough. Our definition of spam goes beyond the laws in most countries and encompasses what we believe to be true permission email marketing.
Spam is any email you send to someone who hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them on the topic of the email.
But that’s not enough. Permission is a fuzzy word open to interpretation. Let’s get into some specific scenarios so it’s clear what does and doesn’t constitute permission.
What kind of email addresses are OK to send to with our newsletter service?
To send email to anyone using this service, you must have clearly obtained their permission. This could be done through:
- An email newsletter subscribe form on your web site.
- An opt-in checkbox on a form. This checkbox must not be checked by default, the person completing the form must willingly select the checkbox to indicate they want to hear from you.
- If someone completes an offline form like a survey or enters a competition, you can only contact them if it was explained to them that they would be contacted by email AND they ticked a box indicating they would like to be contacted.
- Customers who have purchased from you within the last 2 years.
- If someone gives you their business card and you have explained to them that you will be in touch by email, you can contact them. If they dropped their business card in a fishbowl at a trade show, there must be a sign indicating they will be contacted by email.
Basically, you can only ever email anyone who has clearly given you permission to email them specifically about the subject you’re contacting them about.
What kind of email address ARE NOT OK to send to with our newsletter service?
Anything outside the examples above doesn’t equal permission in our eyes, but here are some examples to make sure we’re crystal clear. By using our newsletter service, you agree not to import or send to any email address which:
- You do not have explicit, provable permission to contact in relation to the topic of the email you’re sending.
- You bought, loaned, rented or in any way acquired from a third party, no matter what they claim about quality or permission. You need to obtain permission yourself.
- You haven’t contacted via email in the last 2 years. Permission doesn’t age well and these people have either changed email address or won’t remember giving their permission in the first place.
- You scraped or copy and pasted from the web. Just because people publish their email address doesn’t mean they want to hear from you.
Sure, some of these people might have given you their email address, but what’s missing is your permission to email them commercial messages. Blasting promotional emails to any of these people won’t be effective and will more than likely see your email marked as spam by many of your recipients.
What content MUST I include in my email?
Every email you send using our newsletter service must include the following:
- A single-click unsubscribe link that instantly removes the subscriber from your list. Once they unsubscribe, you can never email them again.
- The name and physical address of the sender. If you’re sending an email for your client, you’ll need to include your client’s details instead.
How we’ll know if you don’t have permission
Our newsletter service has numerous layers of approval and monitoring to ensure you comply with our anti-spam policy. Here’s a few of them:
- Until your account has been approved by a member of our team, every email you send will need to be approved.
- Our software is directly integrated into the spam reporting systems for some of the biggest ISP’s like Hotmail and AOL. If you don’t have permission and someone marks your campaign as spam, we’ll know about it the moment that button is pressed. If you receive a complaint rate greater than 0.25% of all recipients (that’s 25 complaints for every 10,000 recipients) your account will be terminated. This is a generous figure that takes into account false spam reports.
- Our team verifies all large lists imported into our software. Until we’ve given it the all clear, you can’t send to it.
- We monitor blacklists and our abuse accounts all day every day. We can pinpoint who is causing us delivery problems or attracting complaints very easily.
If we do discover that you’re emailing people without their permission, we will terminate your account with our newsletter service immediately.
In the end, it’s really common sense. Take off your marketing hat and put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. If they don’t recognize who you are or aren’t interested in what you’re sending, they’ll think you’re a spammer. It’s that simple.
