Saturday, October 31, 2009

Bellissima Enters The World of Publishing... Email Newsletters, That Is!

Email Newsletters are a huge part of online retail marketing, and I’ve always known it’s something we should be doing. Every time I receive a company’s newletter in my inbox, I think to myself “When am I going to buckle down and finally get this done?“

I even started collecting subscribers over 6 months ago in anticipation of publishing monthly newsletters. But somehow, even though I set my mind to it, I never managed to decide on just how I could make Bellissima‘s email newsletter a reality.

Over the years, I’ve researched lots of email marketing companies and have been terribly confused, incredibly overwhelmed or just plain disappointed. And if I were to be perfectly honest with myself, quite intimidated, too. Confused by too many choices, overwhelmed by the necessity to learn yet another software program, disappointed in the lack of value offered by most companies for the money.

Until yesterday.

Scanning my inbox yesterday morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see a new email marketing offer - encouraged, but definitely somewhat cynical.

I’m very satisfied as a customer of www.hostway.com, the company that generated the offer - I have been purchasing several website domain names from them for many years now. They provide services from web hosting to pc backup and utilities - and now marketing and promotional tools. So I couldn't resist taking a peek…

And lo and behold, my skepticism all but vanished when I discovered that their new email newsletter service is just as easy as writing this blog post, looks professional and attractive and is even FREE with my current domain name subscription! Of course, I’m restricted to only 100 email addresses (an additional $9.95 per month gives me unlimited addresses), but as a test run for my first foray into newsletter publishing, I can live with that.

And:
I can use their templates.
I can use my own photos.
I don’t need to download any software.
I don’t need to follow pages & pages of complicated instructions.
I don’t need to know any html.
It’s actually easy - and fun!

And so, Bellissima‘s very first Email NewsLetter went out yesterday afternoon… and I’m delighted!

If you’d like to take a peek, be sure to send me your email address!