January 14th, 2007
I was sure Zookoda was a perfect solution for my e-mail marketing purposes. It was a breeze to register with them, the backend is intuitive, but then it took them about two weeks to send me the confirmation that I was allowed to broadcast my newsletters.
Within those two weeks I have discovered that Zookoda was on sale – so there is a high probability that they will go out of business completely – one will need to search for another e-mail marketing solution. Added to that there is some risk to lose your database of subscribers stored with Zookoda.
I also explored online feedback about this service and discovered that their deliverability rate is the lowest among their competitors.
So, once I have got the confirmation about my ability to use their service in full I have explored a few more similar solutions:
- feedburner
- feedblitz
- squeet
They all function in an identical way, but as most webmasters recommend FeedBlitz I made up my mind to follow the crowd. The service is good at deliverability and it is very important now with e-mail marketing.
I have registered, added my feeds and placed e-mail subscription option on my websites within 10-15 minutes. One thing I do not like (but I can easily change that if I opt into a paid subscription plan) is that neither my subscribers nor I can adjust the frequency to get the newsletters. All updates are automatically broadcasted on a daily basis that might annoy your subscribers – I am not quite sure I would like to get daily updates even from my favorite websites.
Another issue that I would like to change is the option to add some ads into your e-mail newsletter.
And finally it would be nice to customize the e-mail newsletter template. All listed drawbacks are easily eliminated if you choose any of a paid plan. As I am not yet sure about the impact of e-mail marketing on development of my websites I would rather keep using a free version of the service for now.
Summary: I am not sure about the effect of this e-mail feature on websites. I do not expect some drastic traffic increase or better search engine rankings, but every bit counts.
Added to that e-mail marketing remains the most popular way to keep in contact with your visitors and customers.
[tags]e-mail marketing, website development, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, make money online, home based job, earn your living online[/tags]