Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Comparison Shopping: Permission-Based Email

I've been thinking for a while about getting a Constant Contact account, especially now that I've taken on a big volunteer project (but that's a posting to itself.)

Constant Contact is a permission-based email service. You can use it to send emails to people who have agreed to received your emails (no spamming). You get good reports back as to how many people received and opened your emails. For small organizations that send out limited numbers of emails, the charge is $15 a month, which seems pretty reasonable.

But as I mentioned before, today is the last day to renew website domains before the price goes up. As long as I was at GoDaddy I thought I would update my profile. Under the "Support and Community" tab they had an Express Email forum for permission-based marketers.

I spent at least 10 minutes flipping around on the site trying to figure out if they charged for Express Email. Finally I had to resort to Google, whereupon I learned that Express Email offers all the features I wanted from Constant Contact for half the price or less. (One month is $7.99/mo; thirty six months is $6.39/mo.)

The main difference is that with Constant Contact I can send unlimited emails. GoDaddy would limit me to 500/mo. If you start receiving oodles of professionally-formatted emails from me, you'll know why.

Reminder: renew your domains today to avoid the 7% price increase.

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