Constant Contact continues to stay ahead of the bar with its acquisition of Social Media email service Nutshell Mail. I have been a Constant Contact user/reseller for many years now, I have also been using the Nutshell Mail service for that last 3 months and it makes perfect sense for this union to happen at this point in time. Take a look at the Youtube video below with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman and Co-founders of Nutshell Mail Mark Schmulen and David Lyman.

Mark Schmulen and David Lyman will lead Constant Contact’s new Bay Area office, to be opened later this year, establishing a West Coast presence for the company. Schmulen will serve as Constant Contact’s general manager of social media, and David Lyman as director of software development. The company is looking for high-energy, talented engineers with social media experience and a passion for helping small businesses succeed to join the West Coast team. Job openings will be posted at constantcontact.com/jobs.

I have been sending out Broadcast Emails for about 10 years now. Ever since I understood how to use the BCC in my old copy of Outlook Express. I was first introduced to sending email via a third party service like Constant Contact almost 7 years ago. We now have so many choices when it comes to sending Broadcast email. Email marketing has become more of a science then a service.

Now enter the age of RSS or really simple syndication. In a recent blog post Eric Frenchman of the Blog Pardon My French wrote on the title “RSS Feed v.s. Email – Just a Lightweight Bout Part 1“. In his post he mentioned

“Simple, it is another form of communication that makes it very easy to push out information to clients. Plus, it is very simple to create and simple for someone to opt-in to receive it. Now, the feeds themselves are not personalized so you theoretically don’t have the 1:1 communication power of email, but there is nothing simpler than signing up for a feed and then accessing the feed. ”

“I have a lot of feeds set up. They have not decreased my email usage, but what they have done is decreased my site visits. For example, I set one up for a few ebay products that I like to watch, so instead of going to ebay and searching for them, I just access the feeds. RSS is also great for getting breaking news and staying on top of your favorite sites in a matter a minutes. Again, in this case think of them as a news clipping service.”

I would have to agree with Eric. I also have a RSS reader and have an RSS Feed for all my Blogs but I still send out just as much email if not more. You really can’t replace the tracking of Open Rates and Click throughs on your links withing your html broadcast emails.

If you want the best of both worlds I would suggest an email marketing service like iContact.com. You can send out broadcast emails and send those same emails to a RSS feed all at one time. Whether you want to send an email newsletter, survey, or autoresponder or update a blog or RSS feed, iContact gives you the power to manage all your multi-channel emarketing communications in one simple, central, and on-demand web-based tool that allows you to take advantage of every possible opportunity to get your message through to your desired audience.

Feedblitz allows you to do some of the same thing but it is extremely limited in the designing of your broadcast html email. It is very good though of taking your blog entries and sending them to your email list and allow you to edit the time of delivery.

Email marketing is not dead or dying. It is evolving and continuing to meet the needs of those of us who need to communicate with our customers and prospects.

All the best

JB