What tools are you using for newsletters & email marketing?

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Permalink Reply by GoBike on March 20, 2009 at 6:44pm

I currently use Zoomerang to solicit input on my outdoor group's activities as well as GoogleGroups. Is there a better tool you could recommend for me to use?

I like the community feature of Googlegroups but it relies on users logging in and using the site, like many forums do. How do I get my users to want to login to the site and use it more?

Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Mike Morris on March 21, 2009 at 8:17pm

GoBike,

Google Groups (and Yahoo Groups for that matter) is probably the easiest tool for doing what it is you're doing. It's got the basic community features, as you mentioned, as well as some of the file sharing, calendaring/event functionality. An alternative to Google/Yahoo Groups is to use what this community is built on...... Ning (http://ning.com). In general, it has more advanced features, nice templating and pretty good control over how content is layed out.

Now, the second part of your question has an easy answer...but in practice, is difficult to do. In order to get people to become more actively engaged on your site you need either really great content that changes frequently enough where people want to come back often, an active group of core members who keep an interesting stream of posts flowing or a combination of both!

It is probably also a good idea to email a "digest" of the sites recent activity on a weekly basis to keep members informed of what's been going on. This will drive more traffic to your group and hopefully spur some activity on the site. Good luck!

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Permalink Reply by John Crosby on March 27, 2009 at 11:23am

We use a Web-based application called Informz that bridges with our database. It allows us to track usage and record relevant info back into our d-base. Pretty good system that could use a more intuitive and updated email design setup. But for the money, it's well worth it.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Nolan on March 31, 2009 at 1:40pm

MailChimp and Constant Contact

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