Email is the great­est mar­ket­ing tool in his­tory. If used prop­erly, noth­ing is more per­son­al­ized, inex­pen­sive, inter­ac­tive or eas­ier to exe­cute. Chris Bag­got

While email mar­ket­ing is excep­tion­ally pow­er­ful, it is also one of the least used, least under­stood, and least opti­mized parts of many small ecom­merce websites.

To help small online busi­nesses close the knowl­edge gab, we wanted to list the top Email Mar­ket­ing Blogs, Tools, and Resources that we have come across. Please help us add to this list if you notice that we missed anything.

The Top 5 Email Mar­ket­ing Blogs

Blog: Chris Bag­got
URL: http://exacttarget.typepad.com/chrisbaggott/
Descrip­tion: Email mar­ket­ing best prac­tices. Voted best of the web by For­tune and MarketingSherpa

Blog: No Man is an Island
URL: http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/
Descrip­tion: Blog from Email Mar­ket­ing Reports

Blog: Bill Nussey
URL: http://emailmarketing.silverpop.com/
Descrip­tion: Author of “The Quiet Rev­o­lu­tion in Email Marketing

Blog: Tamara Gie­len
URL: http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/
Descrip­tion: Best prac­tices, tips & tricks to opti­mize your next email mar­ket­ing campaign.

Blog: The Email Wars
URL: http://www.theemailwars.com/
Descrip­tion: Opti­miz­ing email deliverability

The Top Email Mar­ket­ing AutoRe­spon­der Tools

To suc­ceed with email mar­ket­ing, the sin­gle most impor­tant tool that every small online busi­ness needs to find is an autore­spon­der. An Autore­spon­der is an email mar­ket­ing soft­ware appli­ca­tion that will auto­mat­i­cally broad­cast newslet­ters and deliver tar­geted emails to your prospects. Unfor­tu­nately, find­ing a great, afford­able, email mar­ket­ing tool is not easy.

We are going to list the top 5 tools that we are aware of but it is impor­tant to note that we are not fully sat­is­fied with any of them. As you know, our mantra is “test every­thing” and none of the auto-responders devel­oped for small busi­nesses offer A/B test­ing, which makes opti­miz­ing your online email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns very painful and slow. The only tool that offers all the fea­tures that we liked is Lyris, but that is far too expen­sive. We just listed it so that you can see what will hope­fully one day be avail­able to all of us.

Tool 1: AutoRe­spon­se­Plus
URL: http://www.autoresponseplus.com/
Descrip­tion: AutoRe­sponse Plus is a solid choice if your email list has grown beyond 25,000 sub­scribers and if you want an auto-responder that you install on your own server. This is the sys­tem that we use. It is func­tional and does the basics right but if you are doing broad­casts beyond 100,000 sub­scribers then we rec­om­mend get­ting a ded­i­cated server just for ARP alone since it takes up a lot of resurces.

Tool 2: GetRe­sponse
URL: http://www.getresponse.com/
Descrip­tion: GetRe­sponse is the per­fect tool for begin­ners. It is offered at the low­est price point and is a fully hosted solu­tion so you do not need any­thing to install to get started. When we last used it, how­ever, we noticed that as your email lists grows into the tens of thou­sands you might expe­ri­ence scal­ing prob­lems with GetResponse.

Tool 3: AWe­ber
URL: http://www.aweber.com/
Descrip­tion: We have heard great things from AWe­ber cus­tomers say­ing that the sys­tem is very easy to use and that they have one of the high­est email deliv­er­abil­ity rates in the indus­try. Since email deliv­er­abil­ity is a hot issue, this one might also be a great choice if you are just get­ting started. How­ever, their pric­ing plan only goes to 20,000 sub­scribers and since we have hun­dreds of thou­sands we have to go with Auto-Response-Plus.

Tool 4: Zoodoka
URL:http://www.zookoda.com/
Descrip­tion: Email mar­ket­ing for blogs. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly sum­mary of your lat­est blog posts directly into your vis­tors inbox. Oh…did we men­tion… for FREE?

Tool 5: Lyris
URL: http://www.lyris.com/
Descrip­tion: This one is a lux­ury email mar­ket­ing appli­ca­tion. It is far beyond the reach of any small busi­ness but it is great to see where email mar­ket­ing tools are headed. Now we just need to get the lit­tle ven­dors to upgrade their capabilities.

The Top Email Mar­ket­ing Resources

Resource 1: Email Mar­ket­ing Reports
URL: http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/
Descrip­tion: Hun­dreds of arti­cles to help you start or improve your email marketing.

Resource 2: Mar­ket­ing Sherpa — Email Mar­ket­ing Newslet­ter
URL: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/index.php
Descrip­tion: This is one of our favorite online newslet­ters with high qual­ity con­tent and test results and best practices.

Resource 3: Return Path Resources
URL: http://www.returnpath.biz/resources/
Descrip­tion: Com­pany site with a good resource cen­ter. Their arti­cles tend to be a lit­tle bor­ing and aca­d­e­mic though and mostly applic­a­ble to big online retail­ers. For truly great arti­cles — take a look at the resource below.

Resource 4: Email­L­abs Learn­ing Cen­ter
URL: http://www.emaillabs.com/resources/
Descrip­tion: Their resource cen­ter has some excel­lent arti­cles on best times of day to send, text vs HTML open rates, send time reports and more. All com­plete with met­rics, num­bers and charts that would make a math major smile. We loved it.
Resource 5: Con­stant Con­tact Learn­ing Cen­ter
URL: http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/
Descrip­tion: Great col­lec­tion of free email mar­ket­ing resources.

Do you know of any other great email mar­ket­ing tools, blogs, and resources that we have left out? Please let us know and we’ll add them to the list.

Addi­tions: Tools Rec­om­mended by Our Readers

Rec­om­men­da­tion 1: Cam­paign Mon­i­tor
URL: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/
Descrip­tion: Cam­paign mon­i­tor offers an excel­lent email mar­ket­ing tool, blog, and resources.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 2: Mail Chimp
URL: http://www.mailchimp.com/
Descrip­tion: Another excel­lent email newslet­ter tool with lots of great resources and an excel­lent blog that is worth following.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 3: Email Round­table
URL: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/emailroundtable/
Descrip­tion: Email Mar­ket­ing Round­table is a Yahoo Group con­sist­ing of e-commerce and online mar­ket­ing per­son­nel from lead­ing brands. Peo­ple here come together to dis­cuss what works and what flops when it comes to craft­ing and exe­cut­ing win­ning email mar­ket­ing pro­grams for their organizations.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 4: R | Mail — RSS to Email
URL: http://www.r-mail.org/
Descrip­tion: Lets you sub­scribe by Email to Any RSS Feed.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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