Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PR pros, brand managers, businesses, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers, journalists.
For more than a decade, guys I respect like Chris Brogan, John Hlinko, Nicco Mele,CC Chapman, and Christopher Penn have been a broken record when it comes down to brass tacks: cultivating an email list is the only real reason to do social media marketing, content marketing, inbound marketing, guest blogging, or column-writing. I take that back, selling and making money is the only reason, at the end of the day, but just ask anyone in the world of fundraising, ecommerce, and sales the true value, in dollars, of a fresh, segmented, double-opt-in, targeted list, per subscriber, and I bet you’ll pop your wig (upwards of $3+ per-record for really desirable lists)
I have never started a list. I have everything else. I have never wanted to commit to wrangling the content needed to support a hungry list. Collecting a list is one thing but actually working the list, engaging the list, and setting aside the resources and creativity necessary to get an interesting, informative, compelling, well-written, entertaining, and salient newsletter out the door, checked and edited, every week is hard enough but actually shoehorning everything into a format that is both professional-looking and also deliverable.
I have gone through the discovery phase a number of times. I think I started, back in the day, with Mailman. I loved mailman because it was just an Open source Listserv software, not a proper broadcast list.. Of course, my next try was MailChimp.com, which is at least integrated with most every other app, but while it’s come a long way, it’s still more of a framework than it is a wizard.
I live in a world of Gmail,Wordpress and SquareSpace. I live in an app world. My tools should enable me to spend all my time writing content for my list subscribers instead of all sorts of post-production “splicing” — I want to do what I do when I blog: write it up, add some photos and a title, and then click [Post].
Easy peasy.
So, in my exploration, I have come upon GetResponse, which seems to me to be sort of like the SquareSpace of direct email. Everything’s drag-and-drop, everything is template-based. The job of a perfect app, in my opinion, is a service program that makes it so easy to get to 80% perfect — totally good enough — so that all the hard stuff — setup, design, branding, customization, production, post-production — out of the way as much as possible so that you and I can get to the business of trying to fit one or more weekly missives to my prospects, clients, fans, friends, and followers (okay, twice-a-month; okay, then, monthly).
