Email Marketing That Doesn't Look Like Email Marketing.
It seems to me that nearly every email marketing service is getting it wrong.
From my experience, HTML email templates serve one primary function–to make sure your message lands squarely in the "Promotions" tab in Gmail, or to otherwise be mentally flagged by your audience as "spam" or "advertising" and swiftly deleted or ignored.
By far my best success has come from sending people a plain text message that speaks to them like a fellow human being.
Yet every one of these platforms insist on forcing you to use one of these silly templates that transactionalize the hell out of my relationship with my audience, and shred any semblence of humanity.
All I want is to be able to send an email from my desktop email client to everybody@interested.com and have it distributed to my list. Email me back a report in an hour. I don't want to have to open up your slow-loading SaaS app and click through a million screens.
Does anybody know of a service that works like this?
Hi everyone, I’ve launched https://mateai.io and I’d like to give you FREE access as a Beta-Tester for 7 days, after that it will cost 19$.
You can do two things with MateAI:
I am very curious about your feedback and hope you will find the tool useful!
I haven't heard service like this.
Hey Paul, I've never heard of a service like this, but I think most ESPs will let you send a plain text email to your list. So the solution you're proposing only saves you a little bit of hassle of opening a browser and logging in. I agree that many ESP sites are really bloated and slow (ahem, Mailchimp) but there are others like EmailOctopus that are pretty streamlined.
Looks like EmailOctopus has a "totally plain" template. This is the first time I've seen this, and I've signed up for so many ESPs I've lost count.
I seem to recall mailchimp has a plain template too, though it's been a while.
I think your point is a good one. I'm not sure why so many companies uses templates. Probably because "everyone else does it", and they want to "look professional".
Mixmax is an email tool that lets you do bulk emails with templates. I found it incredibly effective for sending larger volumes of personal emails.
I've looked at this one, though I don't think I'm their target market. Seems like this is more of a CRM tool for sales people.
If you want to send emails at scale that are treated like "real" personal emails, you want to look at tools like Yesware.
These tools send emails to a list of recipients that you upload as a CSV file directly from Outlook or Gmail.
You can customize each email by pulling information from that CSV file and using so called 'dynamic fields'. That will look something like this:
These emails are not distinguishable form a regular email, they don't have any unsubscribe link etc.
This is amazing for reaching out to a small audience of followers or prospects. But it's restricted by the limits of your email provider. Gmail allows to send something between 400-800 emails per day. So this will not work if you have a large email list.
But definitely something to look into if you are interested in sending emails that don't look like marketing emails. 😉
Gave Yesware a look, but I still think this is an 18-wheeler, while what I'm looking for is closer to an electric skateboard.
I’ve used Streak in the past - it’s closer to a small car. If you really want an electric skateboard, you could manage it all from google sheets / gmail / a bit of scripting. I’ve built this out before to send email to small mailing lists. Can add in customization, etc. No reporting on open rates though.
Makes sense, there are other, more lean tools. We just haven't used them so can't give any recommendations. :)